The Phoenix Zoo

One of the Nations to Zoos for Kids

The Phoenix Zoo

Arizona Center for

Nature Conservation.

The Phoenix Zoo is Arizona’s premier non profit zoological society.  The Phoenix Zoo is supported by community and sponsor donations. In turn the zoo supports conservation locally, regionally and internationally. Their efforts support endangered species all over the globe.

The Phoenix Zoo has more than 3,000 animals on exhibit and maintains over 30 endangered or threatened species. The Phoenix Zoo is also home to some of Arizona’s most popular annual events.

CLIENT GOALS

The Phoenix Zoo originally approached us to help maintain their website updates, annual events and specials. They required a company that could offer large scale webmaster services and could promise fast turn times on updates for their time sensitive posts.

  • Goal 1. Retain a webmaster service with fast turn times.
  • Goal 2. A central contact for all department heads to reach out with updates.
  • Goal 3. The ability to launch micro-sites for popular annual events.
  • Goal 4. Custom design services for these annual events.
  • Goal 5. The ability to have their site integrate with a third party payment platform.

OUR APPROACH

In order to best service the Phoenix Zoo, we had to create mechanisms to interact with all of their departments; about 20 individuals in total. Each department was responsible for a different section of the site and had different needs and goals for their portion of the web presence. We also had to interface with the internal design department to ensure that the website elements had similar branding to the current promotions, outdoor media, collateral and on location art.

Strategy

at a glance

The Phoenix Zoo’s website was extremely large and housed information for every animal, event and activity that the zoo offered. With over a million website visitors yearly, the updates had to be prompt and they had to be correct when they went live. The zoo’s website was actively used by visitors, sponsor, donors and students doing research. All of these visitors needed to be able to find resources quickly and even though there were hundreds of pages, the navigation needed to remain simple and straightforward.

Additionally, the Zoo’s website was built on a custom CMS that required a large amount of coding knowledge to maintain and update. Our services needed to include managing and maintaining their custom CMS, managing a large amount of updates from their departments and managing all events and updates in a timely matter. This meant creating a workflow with departments that allowed submission of content and updates in a simple and straight forward way.

We also had the opportunity to design microsites for many of their events, including Zoobrew, Zoofari, Howl-O-Ween and Zoolights. These projects required planning and communicating with the departments for each event and working with their in house graphic design team to ensure our designs matched the branding they had created and leveraged the necessary elements.