Lincoln Park Zoo: Reimagining the visitor experience

What sparked the need for change?

“Our team focused on two key projects that are essential for our zoo. First, we looked at ways to enhance visitor engagement with better animal visibility. Animals in our care need ample space in their habitats for their well-being, including space behind the scenes, which sometimes means they’re out of sight for visitors. We wanted to test an alternative way for our guests to see animals behind the scenes during their visit.

Second, we wanted to enhance our marketing strategies through data centralization and potential. Our team was pulling reports manually and accessing several different platforms to get the information we needed, slowing down our processes. Efficient marketing is important— as a nonprofit institution that is free for visitors, we operate with a lean budget, and around 85 percent of our funding comes from donations and on-ground purchases. So, we need thorough, comparable data to speed up decision-making and improve our marketing ROI.”

What solution did the teams unlock by working together?

“The PwC team worked on a pro bono basis to help us reimagine the visitor experience through digital content strategies. One common complaint from zoo guests is that some species aren’t consistently visible in their habitat. We tested several ideas before landing on a pilot program to provide behind-the-scenes footage to compensate. We chose one of our most popular animals — the polar bears — and the PwC team built a machine learning model that automatically creates clips for a highlight reel that visitors can view from our web app. It shows the possibilities for how technology can help us reach visitors in new ways.

Simultaneously, to help improve marketing performance, PwC identified marketing data sources and what metrics would be relevant to our team and quickly built us a dashboard that provided new insights that transformed our decision-making, allowing us to be much more proactive.”

Where did tech innovation meet human ingenuity?

“PwC worked with us on where we could use technology to make exploring the zoo more engaging while maintaining the natural feel we’re known for. That meant helping us select the right tech and code the data integration and visualizations. Now, our marketing team has access to 10 different data sources pulled into a single dashboard. The team can access insights instantly and spend more time on strategic actions. It has helped us provide greater transparency for the C-suite as well, which builds institution-wide understanding of what we do and makes it easier to justify and secure funding for future initiatives.”

What was the real-world impact of approaching things differently?

“PwC brought next-level innovations to the zoo, helping our team better use technology to help deliver on our mission. From thinking about what automations would streamline work, to building a custom machine learning model that can analyze video to pick out the relevant polar bear behaviors for our visitors to see — creativity ran high and always with an eye for improving the guest experience while maintaining operational potential.”