the marketing attractions podcast

Conversations on How Nonprofit Attractions Drive Attendance Through Marketing

Spotlight: Diana Vega, Chief of Operations at Zoo Miami

Diana Vega from Zoo Miami discusses how collaboration and creativity can elevate guest experiences at nonprofit attractions. It’s our view that marketing gets people through the door and guest experience turns them into members.

We talk about:

  • Empowering Staff: Involving frontline employees in solutions enhances both operations and the guest experience.
  • Revamping Internal Meeting Structure: Ways Diana changed weekly internal meetings to increase employee buy-in.
  • Accessibility Upgrades: Partnering with the county ADA office, they improved pathways, doors, and spaces for better mobility and inclusivity.
  • Streamlining Animal Experiences: Reorganized flow and added shaded waiting areas, improving efficiency and guest satisfaction.

Join us as we talk about elevating the guest experience at Zoo Miami.


This podcast is produced by attend media.

attend helps nonprofit attractions drive visitation through paid media. Download our free guide to media planning for nonprofit attractions at our site – attend.media

Episode Transcript:

You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. Conversations on how nonprofit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their missions through marketing. Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of Attend Media. Jenny, today we got a spotlight episode. It’s Diana Vega Chief of Operations at Zoo Miami. What are we going to talk to Diana about? Yeah, today we’re going to talk to Diana about, you know, she’s been with Zoo Miami for 20 years now. So what are some changes that the zoo’s really been going through in terms of their internal communication structure? I think what’s interesting about this conversation is this format cannot, you know, be utilized across any department or all departments within any size organization. But she’s going to talk to us about how it’s really improved the effectiveness of meetings across departments. And we’ll get into some stories about how these changes have impacted things all the way down to the bottom line for our guest experience, right? How the more tied together your teams are, the better experience is your guest will end up having. I think if you’ve made some good breakthroughs at Zoo Miami to help share some of these stories in the effort of this communication. Yeah, I mean, something we talked about a lot on the show is, you know, marketing gets the folks through the door. It’s guest experience. It turns them in to repeat visitors, hopefully members and even better donors. So it’s really interesting to see how Diana’s implemented some of these mark meeting tactics, how that’s fed over to better communication across all departments. She’s going to share, as you mentioned, a few stories about impacting or empowering frontline employees to increase that guest experience. And then that just makes, you know, our job as marketers a little easier, right? So all right, let’s get into it. Diana, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for making the time. Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s an honor. Oh, okay. All right. So tell us your story. How did you, you know, how did you end up at Zoo Miami? How did you end up in the Zoo space? What’s your journey? It was by accident. I was born in Raya’s in California. So my mom raised me going to attractions, zoos, national parks, so love that. But we moved over here for a career opportunity for my mother and I needed a job to be able to pay for college. So I worked at Monkey Jungle first and then I ended up tutoring the HR manager for the concessioniers at Zoo Miami. And I was looking for a job at the at that time and just to find more things to do. And she offered me a job at Sports Service Associates, so it was called. So I worked there at the concessions for a few years and then I moved over to county and I’ve been here for 20 years since I fell in love with the attraction space in the zoom particular. 20 years. All right. And in all 20 years at Zoo Miami, correct? 20 years, yes. I have a longer work career, but 20 years at Miami. Yes. Right, right. Wow. Okay. All right. Excellent. So your current role is chief of operations. Walk us through that. What, what does a day in the life of that role look like? Well, it’s different every single day. I’m sure you hear that a lot from different people, but there’s a lot of troubleshooting, which is great, which I love to do. I have different different teams that I’m responsible for. We have the admissions team, the IT team, facility operations, which includes security, walkway, custodial, and so and the business team. I also have the business team. So it’s, it’s a great ride so far over 100 people and I have four four direct reports right now and it’s just always interesting. No, two days are the same. So you’ve got over 100 people that your, your manager, you’ve got a pretty big operation going on at Zoo Miami, obviously. You guys have really gone through some revamping in the internal communications. Tell us what you’ve implemented and how this has been working across departments. Yes, so when I first started with the sales and events department, we wanted to implement something that would improve communication throughout. So we started with an operations meeting and a marketing meeting and it was, there were very long meetings, sometimes it would take an hour and a half and they were pretty redundant. So what we did was we combined them and now they’re half an hour and it’s not just the sales and events team and the people that are involved with creating events that is now all of the zoo departments. So we have animal health there, we have animal care there, conservation research as well as all the operations team, sales and events team as well. And it’s 30 minutes and everybody talks about their KPIs if they have them assigned to them or any information or updates that they have from the department. So it’s pretty efficient and that’s, it’s just one meeting instead of two. We also implemented one site came to the operations side daily lineups. So that’s focused on the Rockefeller daily huddle habit that he would meet his with his directors every single day. That’s what we do now in every department at different times whenever it’s convenient for them and they talk about what they’re going to do for the day, who they kind of cue the next person that they need to talk to if they need to finish up a project and when I first started that, that was an hour and a half, I don’t know what it is with an hour and a half, but it was an hour and a half with the sales team. There was only five of us which I thought was interesting because we worked in the same room together. So the fact that we had a meeting and it was an hour and a half long was pretty shocking. But when you believe in something, you just keep at it until it becomes more efficient and effective. And now we have 15-minute lineups. We actually changed the name because the huddle, they were kind of like, okay, I can sit down, relax, we can just chat where lineup was more. They all lined up, talked about what they needed to talk about and then we kept going around, kept going on our business. So that was an improvement there. You know, lineup format, are they, are the participants of the meeting, are they actually standing? Or, so they’re recording just and it’s for no more than 15 minutes. Oh my gosh, that’s so brilliant. If you give people a seat, they’re going to sit forever and if we have them stand, it’s like, okay, let’s all focus and get everything done and get out of here, right? Yes, and that’s exactly why we did it because when we first initiated it, everybody was sitting down. So it took an hour and a half because you just relax. And then what happens is you start going off on tangents. So this is very focused on what are you going to do during the day? What are we going to accomplish? What’s expected of you? And if you need to meet with somebody in particular, it also gives an opportunity for any of the managers or anybody from any other section to talk to that section, because for example, the admissions team has a lineup every Saturday and Sunday at 9/20 in the morning at the turnstiles. So if you need to talk to them or tell them something, you know that they’re always there. And so that’s helped improve communication across all departments. And this lineup format, this is a little bit different than the combining the meetings and putting a time limit on that. Yes, so the meetings are just, we call it operations meeting, but everybody kind of came on board, which is great. We want an open line of communication, we want to be transparent, and so we want everybody to communicate. That has a sit down meeting and we go around the room and we talk, we tell everybody what’s happening with operations first and then they talk about their KPIs, each of the different departments. And then we have some departments that may not have KPIs, they just give updates. So everybody knows what’s going on, whether there is an animal that just arrived, if there are some surgeries. And so it keeps everybody connected to the departments, which is great. And we just started a business meeting, business operation meeting actually a few days ago. So that’s now going to be a monthly meeting, and that’ll be a working meeting across operations for an hour, where we tie in our objectives for business and operations to the zoos objectives, their key commitments to our stakeholders, our guests, our staff, we say our team, instead of our staff, our animals and our guests. So those that ties in our departments to the overall mission vision of the zoo, and then we have key results that we’re looking at accomplishing either per quarter or per year, and the different drivers or whoever that objective is assigned to, they need to let us know what their key actions are going to be, and every quarter will see where they are, they stuck, they need help. And obviously we’ll be looking at the progression weekly in the operations meeting as well as monthly and business and operations meeting. Yeah, so you’re using this kind of okay R format with some kind of strict rules and you got to stand up and it’s a time limit. For audience out there, maybe it’s a marketing manager who’s leading a team, maybe it’s some more operations folks that are saying, okay, I want to revamp how we do our internal communications. Is there like one or two takeaways that you found to be like the most successful within what you’ve implemented? Something that if they can go change tomorrow, what would you do? What would be that piece of advice? I would say first, I would implement the daily line-ups or daily titles. Those are very effective because it really focuses on the team. This is what I’m working on today, and the leadership can say, okay, that’s great. I might need you to pivot a little bit, can you work on this? We need to finish this. And that way you know where everybody is and then you give in time. So that’s great. The okay R framework is a goal setting framework. So it holds you accountable to what you say you’re going to accomplish in the year and we need to be moving towards a goal. So that’s what that framework is about. But I would first definitely start with daily titles just to increase that communication because just because you’re in an office with them doesn’t mean you know what they’re doing every single day. And it just takes 15 minutes. I mean people get coffee in that amount of time. So it’s just a small time of your day and it does improve and the workload a lot. Yeah, improves that focus for the day. I mean coming from agency world, I think we’re all used to these long hour meetings and we’re like, how do we get anything done in the day if all we’re doing is talking about it? So I love calling it the 15 minute, right? That’s all we have and you have to stand up and do it. So whether that’s for remote teams or in-person teams just get up and say your quick piece for the day. So this also is great, right? The change in the internal communications. But you know, how is that improving everything else around the zoo, right? I think ultimately we want to know how are the changes internally affecting guests externally? So maybe share some ways that you guys have learned from doing some of this or what you’ve learned from meeting with all teams effectively now and how that’s starting to improve guest experience overall for zoo Miami. Oh yes. And also the director holds quarterly all staff meetings so that people can ask the leadership questions and know what projects are coming. So what construction projects, anything the operations teams are doing, sales and events, team marketing, things like that. So it keeps everybody in the loop. What I think helps with that is that you’re not just a cashier. You’re not just a person that is picking up trash. You actually have a stake in the overall mission and vision of the attraction you’re part of right now. It’s the zoo. So for us, it’s really important for frontline to meet to really feel relevant and that they’re important. They’re actually more important than the leaders to be honest because they’re the ones that are guest facing all of the time and so if the guests are not happy, that’s the takeaway they’re going to get. I never want to visit this attraction again, but if they are, then they’re going to go ahead and tell one person if they’re upset, they’re going to tell 10 people. So you have to work so much harder to get that positive feedback out there and it’s just you want them to enjoy their job to especially when they’re a Gen Z or even younger, they need to feel like they’re part of that mission and vision and so that’s what we’re trying trying to do create that framework for them. And we hopefully are succeeding. We had one of our transportation guides. They took a guest and of course we treat everybody the same. It doesn’t matter if they’re rich, if they’re poor, doesn’t matter. You trusted us with your discretionary funds and you’re giving us the opportunity to show you a good time and hopefully teach you something and help us help these animals and protect them for future generations to come. So what she did is and her name Sarah, she’s no longer with us. She is often doing some great work with what she study but she did an awesome tour and weeks later our development officer had received a call that the person that she toured around would like to donate $50,000 to the zoo. So you never know who you’re impacting and that I’m sure made her feel real good and made all of us feel really good as well. And it’s just those little small details you never know how you’re going to impact somebody. It could be as easy as you’re walking by and you see a family of four, three of them are taking the picture and the mom’s taking the picture for the kids and the father. You can’t, it doesn’t take any time to just say, hey, do you mind if I take a picture of all of you? They’re going to be eternally grateful. Oh my god. And that memory is going to stick with them. So little things like that make a difference when it comes to the okay argument that like I said it holds us very transparent and very accountable to what we to our goals of the year. We have a couple of empty experiments, exhibits right now where I can have animals go back into them. So we are having a dime of exhibit come in February. What we decided to do is we have four dinosaurs actually five dinosaurs on site right now. Four of them we’re going to put in that empty exhibit as a promoting to help promote the dinosaur exhibit in February coming. So it’s going to be an internal marketing opportunity and it’s going to engage and and activate that habitat. So we’re very excited about that. This should be launching in a couple weeks here in November. So we’re excited to see what that looks like. That’s awesome. I’m hoping Sarah got an opportunity to be part of this lineup and said, yeah, $50,000 donation. That would be something that’s worth her own meeting for that. I mean, that’s such a great story. I love that. Yeah, she’s incredible that that whole team, all of them are very, very good at what they do. Yes. I love you said that improvement in communication overall really helps with like employee buy-in or your team or staff buy-in, right? So they become better what they’re doing. They care more about what they’re doing and then that ends up paying off at the end there with the guests experience. That’s awesome. Jenny, like dinosaur right about that. I mean, obvious is common sense, but I think we all need to be reminded that these frontline employees are the face of the attraction, right? We can put together the most slick, awesome TV commercial. We can buy commercials in the Super Bowl and make our attraction look like the best place in the world, but it’s that frontline experience that is going to be that first touch that is doing a big, big lift on delivering that experience. And I like what Diana saying is empowering those employees, team members, to buy into the mission on the organization that they’re representing. Yeah, I think that how much you engage them is how much they will directly impact your bottom line. You’ll see that on your bottom line. The more you engage them, the more you’ll see the results. You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. Conversations on how non-profit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their mission through marketing. Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of attend media. Attend media is a media planning and buying agency, specializing in zoos, aquariums, gardens and museums. For more information, please visit attend.media. Now back to Ryan and Jenny. Okay, Dana, so from these meetings and working across other teams, like what are some other things that you’re doing or learning, kind of trying to experience or figure out how to improve that guest experience overall in terms of maybe bringing in the right external people to help you learn from their point of view what improvements you can have. Sure. So with our Amazon and Beyond exhibit, for example, we wanted to make that exhibit the location that is the most accessible if we had any any of our guests on the spectrum that that would be the location they can go. They had quiet zones. They had nature playing music. So what we did was we invited the counties ADA office and one of their leaders there is uses a mobile device. So we went from trans-burs, transporting her to the location on an ADA golf cart and that went smooth, thankfully. Made sure that the transportation team is trained on how you can secure that mobile device, how you can unsecure it and that was that was very smooth. And then when we got there we went ahead and said, “Hey, here are some ideas that we’re looking at, how are the doors when you open them? Are they good? Are they too heavy?” They said, “Yes, they’re a little too heavy. You need to tweak them here at the requirements.” We went ahead and did those those small changes that made a big impact there as we were going around and just walking with her. There is a particular location where the jags, you can view them on the right or the left side of you and there is a tree stump there as well as an interactive and it was very difficult for her to get through. So seeing that helped us say, “Oh, well, this might not be the only person that has this challenge here.” So we went ahead and removed the tree stump. We smoothed the area out. We took away the interactive and now it’s just so much easier. It’s a lot bigger. People can cross no problem and it actually focuses the attention more on the jaguars. So it improved it. The experience for everybody. For the cloud forest, what we did there was we said, “How can we make it where it can be more of a tactile experience?” We have these awesome eyelash vipers there and they’re very bright. They’re bright yellow, bright green, but it’s very difficult, especially if you have a visual impediment to see them. They’re rather small. Sometimes they’re hidden in vegetation. So they say, “How can we bring this to life?” So our exhibit manager and one of our senior operations managers, they said, “You know what? Let’s go ahead and just grab it and blow it up and create a structure, a statue of it, but one that kids can touch and feel so they can see it up close and personal.” So that’s what we did. It’s a beautiful statue. It’s yellow, it’s bright. We went ahead and wrapped all the internal building where you feel like a more immersive. It used to be like a pink tone there and now it’s wrapped in forestry. And so it’s it’s very much immersive when you walk in. There’s more than enough room for any mobile devices and kids to play and we are hoping to add another climbable structure in there. Or one that people can take pictures of so that immerses them more and creates memories. There and that was a great kind of prototype and we’re looking at doing that at all the indoor spaces. So we’re moving into floated forest as well, which is also in Amazon and beyond. Very cool. And then how about some of the learnings? I know we were chatting before this about improvements you made to the parrot feeding experience? Yes. So that one was a different tactic. What we did is we wanted to improve the workflow for our team members. They were having a hard time there where people would have to queue, they’d have to wait in line to go and feed the parrots. You have to keep track of who’s in line. They were in the exit lane rather than the entry lane because there was no room in the entry lane. So it was fairly confusing. It was a little chaotic and it didn’t need to be. So what we did was we sat there and we looked at their whole process, timed it, counted the steps that guests had to do. Where they have to backtrack so we can make it more efficient and we redid those flows with their input. So a lot of these answers your front line has for you, they just can’t articulate it. But if you’re there next to them and they say, “Well, this is a pain, this is a pain, you can as an outsider that doesn’t work there every single day but knows the operation because you’re over it or you have something to do with it, you can help improve it for them.” And so that’s what we did. There was also no shade there where if there was rain they could go and hide. They’d have to walk to go to the Australia building. So we went ahead and grabbed one of the booths that we used to use for cashiering and we put them at the site. We rearranged the flow. So now when the guests wait, they wait in the middle so they can wait as people enter and then they can wait as people and they see their family members or friends leave and they’re right there in the open with some shade there and it’s pretty much dramatically changed the site. It’s a lot more aesthetically pleasing as well. Photos for marketing opportunities, it’s a lot better rather than kind of a disheveled location. You can also see backup house. We since screened the backup house and now on the side it says Perth feeding where you can see that that’s the that’s the interaction there that’s taking place rather than before you’re like, “I wonder what’s over there.” And you kind of would walk there or say, “It’s not worth my time and keep going.” So we used that space to hide what was happening behind the scenes as well as market what that was. I love this. So the your frontline employees have helped you improve so many things at the zoo which is awesome that you’re including them and incorporating them more in kind of the bigger picture of zoom eye and the overall. Yes, a manager is definitely a title but a leader is something that they have to give you the the title for, right? So I’m very honored that they view me in that way so I’m able to make these changes for them and help improve their day to day. We’re going to clip that. Well said Diana. Oh thank you. I like improving, you know, just these little details about improving a guest experience but it’s like, okay, you know, you set a reservation at this great restaurant you’ve been looking to go to and you show up and it’s like, “Oh, your table’s not ready. Go wait outside. You bum, get out of here.” And it’s like, wait, what? You know, right off the bat, you’re setting the expert, you’re just diminished as a guess, just completely diminished my experience so far. We haven’t even gotten started. So yeah, I’m wondering to the paired feeding. This sounds so amazing. Let’s do it. Oh no, go wait over here. Like those little details make a huge, huge difference and you talk about word of mouth. Now that this attraction or this interactive is getting some more visibility, these are more photos that are being posted on Instagram. Like who doesn’t want to take a picture of that? That’s super cool. And I’m going in there with a way better attitude. Like even though if I have to wait, it’s in the shade, it’s expected, it’s okay versus like this kind of experience just before you even got to experience the experience. All right, I ran to Zoe. I know that’s okay. And more to that point, people were waiting just to see if they can get in, right? And they would say it’s 20 minute wait. We weren’t sure what wait time it was. And then they said, “Okay, well, go to Australia because it was a dead end there.” And then we’ll come back. And our answer was like, “No, if you leave, then you’d have to start the queue over.” And I’m like, why? So we ended up speaking with animal care. And you just have to have these conversations and say, “Why can’t we make it a free flowing?” The assistant director came up with that. And it’s worked out. You just have to do a free flowing. And we haven’t had problems with that. Rather than having people wait there, I ran to them wait because they’re waiting for a family member that went in. And now, you know, okay, they’re out, we can leave. Rather than waiting to do an experience that there’s really no need is we’re past COVID times or at least COVID is like a flu now, right? So we shouldn’t have those provisions at this stage. I love it. All right. Now for our famous last question. Diana, what do you think nonprofit attractions, zoos, and other cultural attractions should be doing more of in terms of their marketing? So I believe focus groups. I think those are key. We need to do a little bit more of those. I know we’re currently trying to do more of those. If you’re marketing to people it would be nice to know what they’re expecting and what they want to, what they want to see at your attraction. Sometimes we believe that we know what they want instead of just simply asking them. And sometimes they don’t know. So it’d be nice to say, okay, here, like, for example, my empty exhibit situation where I would say, okay, here’s an empty exhibit exhibit here are a couple things I want to do there. Does that resonate with you or do you have any better ideas? I think that’s a much better approach to customer focused groups than to just sit down with them and say, okay, what do you want to do? We have to have some sort of base, some sort of idea of where we’re going and then they can shift us. And I think that’s great. And it’s, it’s a key component, I think, to continuously improve, which is what we should be doing. Well said. All right, Diana from Zoo Miami. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been great. Thank you, Jenny and Ryan. Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to the Marketing Attractions Podcast. If you have a suggestion for a topic or would like to be a guest on the show, please visit our website at MarketingAttractionsPodcast.com. [MUSIC]