What Zoos Can Teach Us About Exceptional Guest Experiences

Dan Titmuss: Hello everyone. Dan here. So if you’ve been tuning in for a while, you’ve probably heard us talk a lot about audience hospitality—those little things we can do to make someone’s experience unforgettable and leave them wanting more. In today’s competitive landscape, every touchpoint counts. Audiences have infinite options of how to spend their time. There are endless streaming platforms, the temptation of a cozy couch, a new episode of The White Lotus or my personal favorite, Below Deck… So how do we stand out and get them to choose our venues instead? Well, the answer isn’t straightforward, but one thing is simple. Exceptional guest experiences matter, and those experiences don’t just happen on their own. They’re designed with intention. From the first click on a website to the moment a visitor steps through your door to engagement after they leave, every interaction shapes how people feel about your organization. We wanted to learn more about what it takes to create a truly exceptional guest experience. So for today’s episode, I sat down with Emily O’Hara, senior director of guest experience at the Detroit Zoological Society. Emily shared how the Detroit Zoo fosters personal connections and creates a welcoming, engaging environment for every guest. We discussed practical strategies for delivering wildly good experiences (get it?) that turn visitors into raving and returning fans. I enjoyed this conversation so much and I know you will too. So without further ado, let’s dive in, shall we?

I’m so excited to be sitting down with Emily O’Hara, the Senior Director of Guest Experience at the Detroit Zoological Society, a nonprofit organization that operates both the Detroit Zoo and Belle Isle Nature Center. Emily, welcome to CI to Eye.

Emily O’Hara: Thank you for having me.

Dan Titmuss: I’ve been so excited about this podcast interview because my major was zoology. For a long time in my life, I was on the career path of animal sciences. I also lived right next to Chester Zoo, which is one of the biggest zoos in the United Kingdom. So much so that I could hear the sea lions barking in the morning, and so I’ve always been obsessed with zoos and love anything to do with animals.

Emily O’Hara: That’s awesome. What is your favorite animal?

Dan Titmuss: Oh, ants. I love ants. Yeah, so I studied rock ants at university. I spent a long time looking at ants on a table and tracking them with a webcam. It’s a whole thing. I’m not sure if it was useful science, but it was definitely science. So yeah, anything to do with ants, I could watch them for hours. What’s your favorite animal?

Emily O’Hara: So traditionally I say my favorite animal is a crested screamer, which is a bird, a very unique looking bird. They used to live at the Detroit Zoo, but the pair that lived here actually moved down to sunny Florida so that they could be outdoors year round. So now I say of the residents who live at the Detroit Zoo, scarlet ibis is currently my favorite. Another bird that lives in our free flight aviary.

Dan Titmuss: Amazing. Watch the search volume on Google Trends of crested screamers popping up after this.

Emily O’Hara: I know. I do suggest you also go and watch a YouTube video of their vocalization. They’re a fun bird.

Dan Titmuss: I’m definitely going to do this after this interview. Many arts and culture organizations don’t have a dedicated director of guest experiences. Tell us more about what your role entails.

Emily O’Hara: So really it’s looking at the guest experience. No matter whether you’re here as a general daytime admission guest or here for a special event, maybe one of our evening hours, or even for a wedding, we want to ensure that you are having a great experience, that you are able to access the amenities that you need, that you’re able to enjoy time with the family members or friends who you’re visiting with, and ultimately that we’re able to connect you to our mission.

Dan Titmuss: And so why is it important to have someone championing this work in an organization?

Emily O’Hara: It’s really important to ensure that we don’t leave the guest experience behind, and in some sense, we can’t operate without it. Especially at cultural organizations, the guest experience is essential because oftentimes we have mission messages that we’re also trying to share. So for the Detroit Zoological Society, we want to connect people, animals, and the natural world. And oftentimes we’re talking about conservation stories or work that we’re doing out around the world or even with the animals who live either at the zoo or at the nature center. And you can’t get to those messages if you haven’t met your basic needs of your guest. It’s one of the, in some sense, founding principles of why schools do free breakfast or free lunch to make sure that their learners are able to focus on what they want them to focus on. So we have a similar philosophy in that we want to ensure that the guests who come feel welcome but also are able to have those basic needs met and that they can kind of move past, where am I going to go get lunch?

How am I going to get to the bathroom in time if my kid tells me he has to go? We want you to be able to have those things taken care of so that you can start to learn about some of the things that we are either doing here at the zoo or some of our conservation efforts around the world. We really want to make sure that we’re able to connect guests with those things while they’re having a great experience. We also want to make sure you’re having a good time with the group that you came with. The highest reported reason why guests are coming to our facilities are to spend time with other people, and we want to make sure that you can have that quality time and be building those memories together as well. And sometimes at the end of the day, you are tired. It’s been a long one. We want to make sure that you have access to restrooms on the way out, that you can grab a water or a snack for your drive home, that you can really take that away so that you can talk about the memories of your day rather than getting caught up in the logistics or the headaches of just adventuring out into the world.

Dan Titmuss: Absolutely. And it seems like your role is more common at exhibit based organizations—things like zoos, museums, aquariums, science centers. But it’s not as common maybe in performance-based institutions. And there are definitely exceptions to that rule that we’ve talked about on the podcast, but do you have any thought why that might be?

Emily O’Hara: Yeah, so for an exhibit based organization, we’re building your experience. So every time someone is coming through the door, we’re kind of curating what it is based on how we’ve set up the journey to go. I do wonder if performance-based institutions, because the thing you’re doing, it’s kind of this external party is coming in and performing and you’re sitting there and taking it in, the crafting of that experience kind of happens in a slightly different format. Performance-based institutions are really engaging with their guests when they arrive and right when they depart and probably during intermission, but not so much during those interim parts when the entertainment is being provided. And so I’m wondering if that is that split that you’re seeing when you’re looking across cultural organizations?

Dan Titmuss: Yeah, definitely. It feels like visiting an exhibit based organization, the experience is the whole thing, whereas at a performance based institution, often the thought is that the experience you’re getting is just the bit where the curtain goes up and maybe we need to rethink that a little.

Emily O’Hara: And in some sense there are certain points in the interaction where it is very much the same. We’re ticket taking, right? Trying to get folks in through the doors. And we want to ensure that the ticket buying process was clear. You know what you’re expecting. We do have amenities, right? Restrooms, vending of some sort, whether it’s restaurants or other dining offerings, and then ultimately, can you get back to your car or back to public transit? How are you getting home afterwards? So ensuring that we’re covering those things. I think we definitely still have a lot of overlaps with each other.

Dan Titmuss: Yeah. What’s the first moment and last moment you want a visitor to experience at Detroit Zoo?

Emily O’Hara: So ideally we want you to come in and say, whoa. We’re really excited to enter this place. We did go through rebranding this last year and we focused on our main entry, so we wanted to make sure that we had light pole banners and big signage, and we have a giant photo op that you can get a family photo with as you’re walking up to our main admission gates so that you have that excitement, that new energy already building on your way into the zoo.

Dan Titmuss: What do you want guests to feel when they leave the zoo? What’s the primary feeling you are aiming for?

Emily O’Hara: I’m hoping joy. We really want to make sure that you had a joyous day. It is a tricky thing in that the end of the day can be exhausting depending on the weather that day. It might’ve been hot, it might’ve been really cold, you might have a hike to get back to your car. So we want to make sure to make that exit as smooth as we can so that you can be talking about the awesome time that you had at the zoo rather than complaining about being tired or I have to go to the bathroom or I’m hungry or thirsty.

Dan Titmuss: It feels like you really thought about hospitality in such a deep way, and there’s so many aspects of that visitor experience that you’ve thought about in their entire journey through the zoo and after. How do you prioritize which areas to focus on? Do you conduct any focus groups or audience behavior research?

Emily O’Hara: So we have a variety of methods. So we’re always collecting visitor feedback, so we send experience surveys after guests come to visit, and we do that for both our daytime guests as well as for events. Last year we were able to bring in a group to do a specialized accessibility survey as well, and that has really helped because especially if you’re talking a zoo, we’ve been around for a long time, so we have infrastructure that has been potentially grandfathered in, but there are better practices that we can institute. So we’re going back through that and prioritizing what reaches more guests, what are things that we can make changes on that can impact across the board. I mean, the great thing about accessibility is that one accessible change that may be targeted for a certain group or individual helps across the board. Curb cuts are always used as the standard example of, curb cuts help strollers. Curb cuts help people who use wheelchairs.

Curb cuts help if you have a dolly and you’re just trying to move stuff across an area. So we want to be prioritizing those things that can really help across the board. And then there’s also just resource limitations, so making sure as you alluded to, we can’t do everything all at once, but we’re really trying to ensure that we’re hitting the things that are the biggest pain points first so that those aren’t lingering. We always want to make sure that we’re acting on those things to the best of our ability so that we can get to the things that will really enhance the guest experience — some of those fun, whimsy… the things that we can really touch on once you get past the basics of what the limitations are.

Dan Titmuss: I mean, the fun and whimsy sort of side of stuff is obviously the bit that people maybe focus on. I can imagine it’d be quite easy to go for the shiny thing, go for a new photo activation or guest activation bit. Whereas what you actually need to do is do all the base work that you’ve done first.

Emily O’Hara: Oh yeah. And one of the other things that we do is regular walks with our team and across the organization. So I do a weekly walk with our head of facilities just to make sure that he and I are on the same page about how are we prioritizing repairs, how are we prioritizing upgrades to different areas — particularly, again, our restrooms, our sidewalks, our fencing — so that we are in alignment with what we want to tackle next.

Dan Titmuss: Have you ever had any really surprising, counterintuitive things you’ve learned through either your walkthroughs or your research? Any light bulb moments?

Emily O’Hara: One of the things that has stuck with me for years now from market research is the idea of accessible institutions from a financial perspective and the idea that just because a certain group of people isn’t coming to your institution, it doesn’t mean they can’t afford to come because you might make it free, but if you’re not welcoming to them, if they don’t feel like it’s a place that they belong, they’re still not going to come. All the free tickets in the world aren’t going to make somebody come to your institution if they don’t feel like it’s meant for them. So that is also something that we really strive to ensure that we’re conveying through our marketing efforts, through ensuring that when we have a lot of different visitors who come visit our campuses, that we have amenities available, that they can feel comfortable, and that they can know they belong here. It’s always stuck with me because I think it’s a default when folks say, oh, such and such are not coming to our campuses. Oftentimes the default is, just give them free tickets and they’ll come. And that doesn’t solve it. It doesn’t fix the problem.

Dan Titmuss: I think there’s a parallel there. We’ve often talked about diversity, inclusion, and accessibility of having the door unlocked versus having the door open. Sure, people can go and open the door if they want to, but by truly welcoming people, by opening the door and inviting them in wholeheartedly, then it makes such a huge difference, I think.

Emily O’Hara: We encountered that in the last year. Last year we had a couple of sensory friendly evenings, and again, it was an effort to say we want to be more welcoming to guests who have sensory sensitivities or sensory needs. So we had some sensory friendly hours and it was from three to seven three times last year where we advertised and were hoping to have folks come in. And I’m really glad that we listened to people who either came or people who didn’t come that said, you know what? Dinner time’s not the best time. We have routines, we need to stick to those routines. So that didn’t work for them. Also knowing, well, these three random dates, there’s no consistency. I can’t build a schedule around that. And so what we ended up doing was we just shifted our model and said… This year we shifted to the second Monday of every month from opening to noon are sensory friendly hours.

And that way our families who we’re working with can plan months ahead of time, consistently see what works for their schedule. It worked better for them as far as time of day, morning time, you can do something that maybe is out of the norm a little bit. But that was just one example of where we had an idea of, oh, we want to help this group of guests who haven’t been coming, and we had to make adjustments. We had to really listen and find out how can we continue to improve on opening that door and having it be open rather than just unlocked. I like that.

Dan Titmuss: Yeah, for sure. Out of interest, what other accommodations do you make for sensory friendly audiences?

Emily O’Hara: So our main thing is we can make adjustments to some of our attractions around the campus. When you enter the zoo right up at the front, the Pope Penguin Conservation Center is the spectacular two story building that houses five different species of penguins. And as part of that experience when you walk in, we have a ramp that you start in South America and then you go down the ramp and you cross Drake’s Passage to go toward Antarctica. And when you’re on Drake’s Passage, there is projection all around you. It is sunny. A sea shanty’s playing in the background under the blue skies, but then it turns to a storm. And so depending on where you are in the cycle, there can be water spray. The whole room feels like it’s kind of moving, it can be loud. So for our sensory sensitivity mornings, we have the lights partially up in that ramp, and then we keep it on daytime the whole time. So you still get the nice experience without some of the unpredictability of that. Also, we have a 4D theater on our campus, and so we can run that without all the effects, so you won’t have the air blowing in your face and we can do our lights partially up. Those are the kinds of modifications that we’re making.

Dan Titmuss: Amazing. That penguin exhibition sounds phenomenal. I’ve never ever seen someone leave a penguin exhibition unhappy. They’re such joyful animals, just watching them on the glass, watching them dive through, and it looks like they’re playing. I don’t know if they are, but it looks like they’re playing.

Emily O’Hara: Yeah, and the great thing I will say with the five different species, they kind of hang out in different areas. They have different habits. The king penguins love — we have a snow machine ice maker. They will stand under it and have little peaks of snow just falling over them. The chinstrap penguins are almost always swimming around in the water. They’re super active. And then the macaroni and rockhopper penguins are often near that kind of South American glass. We’re going into breeding season soon, so they’re going to be moving rocks around. They use rocks to build their nests and kind of present rocks to each other. And so soon that habitat’s going to be full of all kinds of rocks that the penguins can take and manipulate and move around to their nesting areas.

Dan Titmuss: Oh my goodness, magical. I love that so much. You mentioned before the rebrand. And you served on the organization’s core team for new brand development. Can you walk us through some of the elements that were designed to make the guest experience even better with this rebrand?

Emily O’Hara: Yeah, so with the rebrand, it really was about shifting the Detroit Zoological Society and the Detroit Zoo to ensure that we had things that were digitally friendly, but then when you’re on campus, we wanted to make sure that again, it was welcoming, friendly, really conveyed the feeling and the spirit that we wanted to get across. So our new logo has the O’s of the zoo act as these containers that we can also have animals walk through. We use video superimposed behind it. We’ll also have people kind of popping out of them and breaking kind of the shape a little bit as well to really look like they’re integrated with the logo. And that was a way for us to highlight that people are essential as well. And then the other big part of the rebrand was the color palette. We went through and really wanted bright saturated colors that worked together again in a fun way, and we’ve really rolled that out across our campus. We painted some roofs last year thinking about how that integrates into the finishes of our built environment as well, so that it isn’t always just in signage or just in digital formats, but how can we then integrate it into our full campus plan?

Dan Titmuss: So how do you use data to measure the impact of hospitality initiatives? Are there key metrics or visitor behaviors that you track?

Emily O’Hara: Yes. So I mentioned that we do guest experience feedback surveys, and this is one of those fair, poor, good, excellent, and outstanding. So we do have that kind of baseline guest experience question as a KPI. So we are tracking that percentage year after year, but we have other questions on the survey that we are also paying attention to. ‘Likelihood to recommend’ we definitely look at very closely. And then for us as a zoo, we have very specific questions around conservation messaging, animal visibility, and then similar across other boards. Our dining and retail also get a lot of feedback that we’re usually looking at there. And then the other piece of data that we’ve started to integrate more fully are reviews on social media sites. So what comments are we getting on Google reviews, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and then what are guests commenting on social media posts? So we really integrate with our communications team to ensure that we’re capturing those things and looking at them holistically across the board.

Dan Titmuss: I think some leaders see hospitality as maybe a nice to have rather than a necessity. What’s your response to this perspective? How would you argue that hospitality is essential to long-term success?

Emily O’Hara: I think hospitality is essential to ensuring that you have ongoing support of your community, of your guests, of your visitors, of the people who live in and around your institutions. We want to make sure that we’re integrated, that we are providing a community service, and part of that is providing a great experience when you visit. So to me, it is essential for that long-term success to ensure that you’re thriving beyond just today. We want to make sure that we’re in existence decades, centuries, into the future. We just had our 95th anniversary and starting in that planning for that hundredth anniversary and thinking about keeping an organization going for a hundred years requires that buy-in, requires that you have people who want to keep coming back and want to keep supporting both the experience as well as the mission that you’re moving forward.

Dan Titmuss: A hundred years or so, it requires such organizational strength and robustness. When you compare that to — the average Fortune 500 company is under 20 years old.

Emily O’Hara: That is wild to think about that contrast. Yeah.

Dan Titmuss: What’s one mistake you can see cultural organizations making when it comes to hospitality and how can they course correct?

Emily O’Hara: One of the challenges that sometimes comes up is how accessibility is viewed as a nice-to-have down the road. So when projects are getting planned, sometimes accessibility is that add-on thing at the end, and sometimes people think of it as something that can be cut. One of the challenges is that in that you are making a decision and saying, we are intentionally not going to build something that every guest can participate in. And I challenge organizational leaders to really think about the statement that you’re making when — you are silently saying it, but you are still saying, not every guest is important enough for us to have thought about how they were going to engage in this activity. It is something that I know a lot of organizations often end up with one or two champions and they’re able to make some changes, and then when those folks move on or move to other roles or other responsibilities, some of that can fall off again. And it really is something that you have to stay diligent about. You have to build it into your budget and into your planning, and you have to make sure that all of your designers who are on the project understand how important that is. It is something that can get overlooked or left behind, and unfortunately, it’s a trend that I see come and go from different organizations and it’s really unfortunate because it’s a really strong message that not everyone might realize they’re putting out there when they make those decisions.

Dan Titmuss: I think that’s such a good point, and I think we can often see accessibility as you say, this add-on, whereas really it makes sense both ethically to make sure that you are giving everyone a chance to interact with your organization. And it also kind of makes sense financially, and it can often be sort of an uncomfortable thing to say when you make this argument, but that’s a huge portion of your audience or your guests that come to your organization benefit from having accessibility, and so there’s a return on investment argument that you can make as well.

Emily O’Hara: And I would also argue if you’re planning it early in the project, then it gets baked in. It is much lower to build things into a plan. I mentioned earlier how we did the accessibility review last year and one of the things that we knew, old infrastructure, we don’t have automatic door openers on all of our doors across our campus. Well, it costs a lot more to run that electricity, change the hinges on the doors so that — change out the doors so that they can have this accommodation. Adding in push buttons where they didn’t exist before, it’s a large add-on. And so we are gradually chipping away, but we’re saying every single new door that we are planning better have it built in. It is much easier to run the electric out there before you put up the walls, and so we are making sure that those things are built in so that we’re not coming back afterwards and having to correct previous gaps.

Dan Titmuss: And I think that also points to another thing with accessibility is people often think it’s an all or nothing thing. It’s like, oh, well, we can’t be accessible in this 75-year-old exhibit. Right? Because it wasn’t thought about at the time. So we don’t do any of the accessibility. Whereas I think you’re making a really good argument for like, hey, do everything you can. One thing we hear from marketers when we’re talking about hospitality is it doesn’t have much to do with them, but from the outside looking in, there’s actually quite a lot of overlap between marketing and guest experiences. People are interacting with your marketing first and then going to the organization, but really that’s kind of a seamless sort of journey that people are taking. That’s your first interaction, is maybe before you’re even in the parking lot of the zoo. What’s your perspective? How do these two functions work together at Detroit Zoo?

Emily O’Hara: Marketing is essential and critical, I would say, to hospitality. I think at the baseline level they set expectation, so what you are showing or choosing to highlight within a marketing campaign is going to be a guest assumption of what they’re going to encounter when they get there. I’ll say historically, we’ve worked really closely with our marketing team over various years and various campaigns, and it can be a challenge, I’ll say particularly at a zoo, because there are certain animals who might get more clicks, might be more eye catching, but maybe they’re not visible during a certain time of year. And so we have to work really closely with our team to ensure that we’re not setting up a false guest expectation. We don’t want to publicize the big photo of a polar bear when it’s dening season and the female’s going to be behind the scenes.

We have one male and a really large habitat, which is spectacular, but we don’t want to set you up to think this is going to be your one big experience of the day, right? For us, maybe a better thing to highlight then in that particular instance are the penguins because you can get right up to the glass. They’re really visible all year round, and so we try and shift our marketing efforts to align with what the guest expectation should be during that time of year. During the winter, we actually, we will highlight animals who are playing in the snow. So we have river otters or wolverines who are great outdoor snow animals, and we want to highlight our indoor experiences where you can be warm. We have a walkthrough Butterfly Garden and Free Flight Aviary, our National Amphibian Conservation Center. Those are places that you can come to and actually have a really great indoor winter experience as well.

So we’re able to leverage off of each other, but only through really clear communication. So we want to make sure that we are communicating those things. We do a similar thing when we’re marketing our events, ensuring what are going to be the things that people are actually doing. I will say we’ve moved more into leveraging our guest feedback surveys to help drive our marketing for the coming year. So one of the things is we have a 21 plus series where it’s four events throughout the year, evening adult-only drinking events, so we have — Zoo Brew is coming up next, and then Spooky Spirits is our fall one that overlaps with Halloween displays that we have. We have Polar Beers in the winter that overlaps with our wild lights holiday light display. And we went back to our guest feedback surveys and one of the top things that those guests said they enjoyed was seeing animals, and we weren’t really highlighting in our marketing efforts that you can see animals when you come to these events. We had been highlighting drink variety, additional yard games, and that kind of thing. We haven’t gotten rid of that, but we’ve shifted so that we also highlight you have access to the zoo’s campus during Zoo Brew. You can walk around with a beer and watch the camels in the field. You can go back and see the polar bears. So we wanted to ensure that we’re working in lockstep with one another so that the marketing team has the information that they need to be able to move forward and do that as well.

Dan Titmuss: Yeah, that’s such a good example of listening properly to what your audience is saying as well and not going with what you initially think is the guest experience. ‘They’ll like this because there’s lots of drinks.’ Well, you can get lots of drinks at a bar. The big thing is you’re seeing it in the context of all these incredible animals. But, it feels like there’s lots of communication at the Detroit Zoological Society. You’re trying to break down those silos between all these different departments.

Emily O’Hara: It is an ongoing effort.

Dan Titmuss: Of course.

Emily O’Hara: I think for every organization, figuring out where the silos have existed — we have had silos and probably in some sense we still do, but we have worked diligently and very intentionally to try to break some of those things down to ensure that we’re able to move forward in the best direction together. We never want to be undercutting each other’s efforts because ultimately we do all have the same goal. Each one of us needs to have a seat at the table because we are representing a different perspective. So when I’m sitting at the table, I am much more focused on the guest experience than I am on animal wellbeing. It doesn’t mean I’m discounting it, it doesn’t mean that I’m operating without thinking about it, but it means that I’m sitting at the table with that perspective so that when our head of animal research is there, she can be sharing her perspective and we can come together on what the best solution is.

Dan Titmuss: Yeah, it’s about illuminating rather than fighting between two different departments.

Emily O’Hara: And for us, especially in our event planning, one of the big changes that we’ve made in the last two years is just making sure that we’re doing pre-meetings with everybody on campus who wants to attend from the various departments so that the landscape team knows what’s coming up. The maintenance techs know what’s coming up, but also our animal curators know there’s going to be heavy equipment going by certain habitats, and we want to make sure that they’re really clued in on that. We also have this Attractions Trail that this summer is going to have dragons in it — animatronic dragons and mythical creatures. And we will invite our animal teams to come out and we do sound monitoring with them, so any of the habitats that are close to that footprint, we make sure that they’re included in part of that process in the angling of our speakers, in motion, if there’s going to be anything that can be visible from outside of that footprint, we want to make sure that, again, we’re working together so that we aren’t fighting against each other’s goals so that we can all get to the same ultimate end goal of fulfilling our mission together.

Dan Titmuss: So how do you think audience expectations around hospitality will evolve in the next five years, and how should arts and culture leaders prepare?

Emily O’Hara: One of the things that we are tackling is how individualized do we make the experience? While most guests report that they are visiting our attractions or cultural institutions to spend time with other people, there is a tendency to think that we need to really narrow in that experience to cater to an individual. It is something that I feel like within the last decade has really popped up. A lot of, oh, you can customize your phone. Are we used to social media catering your reels, your For You Page? How much are people expecting that the world around them reflects their own desires in that moment? How much does it cater to what they’re expecting? On the negative side of things, people are like, well, does that just develop an echo chamber and how much can you experience new things? And one of our goals is that you do experience new things when you come to the zoo or come to the nature center.

It has been an ongoing discussion. I think it will continue to be an ongoing one. One of the places where we have had that discussion on our campuses is last year, we added a new Detroit Zoo app and our app enables you to pre-plan your visit, build out and save which animals do you want to see, which restaurant maybe do you want to go to for lunch, and then on the app itself, you then have a layer that you’ve built your journey. When we were talking about this, the question came up, are we expecting guests to all have the app on their individual device? Well, no, because we kind of want your group to stay together. We don’t want everyone in your party to break off and have your own experience because much of some of that connection building or storytelling later is that you’re having these experiences together.

So we are hoping that as a family or as a visiting group, you’re sitting down and you’re building out that experience before you come. While it has the capability of providing a completely individualized experience, we’re hoping that you’re still doing it together so that you can take those stories away and share them. Again, it’s something we need to continue to tackle and continue to listen to guests when they’re experiencing these things to find out, how much was it actually important? How much did it enable you to enjoy the experience more or did it even isolate you from people around you?

Dan Titmuss: Did it distract you?

Emily O’Hara: Yeah.

Dan Titmuss: It’s such an interesting nuance because I would automatically think that personalization is better, but really when you go to a performance or you go to an exhibit, the first thing you do when you see something amazing is you look to the person next to you. I remember seeing the cheetahs at Chester Zoo. They were lazy for the whole day and suddenly something got them. They all sprinted towards the door and one of the first things you do, you don’t look at that and log it in your diary. You look to the person next to you and say, did you see that? The first thing you do at a comedy show when you laugh is you look at the person who you’re with to laugh with, and that’s not personalization. That’s about the community. That’s about the experience that you have with people at an organization, at a performance.

Emily O’Hara: And especially in the zoo environment, we are trying to build empathy for animals in a variety of ways, and one of the best ways to do that is to have guests share their own experiences with one another. You might have someone in your visiting group who is uncomfortable around snakes, and you might not feel comfortable going up to a snake habitat yourself, but you might enter that building because your whole group is going in, and then maybe they’ll share, oh, I actually had a garter snake that lived in my backyard. It was really neat for this reason. I saw it sunning itself on a rock one morning. And starting to tell those stories and build past some discomfort that someone may initially say, oh, nope. I actually don’t want to go near — I don’t want to be exposed to certain animals or certain things. And really being in that visiting group can help expand someone’s thinking around those animals as well.

Dan Titmuss: Wow. I love that. One of my favorite things at zoos is listening to a random kid tell me a fact about an animal. I think kids want to share naturally. I think they don’t have the sort of blockers on the adults sometimes have of like, oh, I don’t necessarily want to share this with this other person. Kids, they want to tell you the fact about the smokey jungle frog or something,

Emily O’Hara: And sometimes they’re amazingly fun and I didn’t know them myself either. It can be really fun to go out around campus and see, what are people really connecting to that day? What did they know before they came? What are they finding out while they’re here? And then later finding out, what is it inspiring them to pursue after they leave our campus, too?

Dan Titmuss: If an organization wants to improve its visitor experience but doesn’t know where to start or perhaps has very limited resources, what’s one small step they could take today?

Emily O’Hara: I think the first step is asking what needs to be improved. Figuring out where you should actually be focusing your time, effort, and energy to me is the baseline. Is to get that initial feedback. And it doesn’t mean that you have to initially do a full survey of everyone who’s come to your organization. In the last year, one of the things that we did when we were starting to work on our campus navigation project was I did a survey of our frontline staff. I said, where do people ask you to go to first? Where are they trying to get to when they enter the campus? And we were able to get a great initial baseline for us to then start digging into so that we can ask further guest questions, but that was, we had data that we just had never compiled, and that really enabled us to get a headstart on some things before we could launch into a full survey or full data collection around that.

Dan Titmuss: Absolutely. It really reminds me how often we’ve had the conversation with marketers about, hey, talk to your box office staff because they are the people who are seeing the guests first. They’re seeing your patrons first. They get all the questions that you’ve never even thought would be possible to ask or you thought had an obvious answer.

Emily O’Hara: That’s the other place that we really tap into. What questions are people calling and asking about? Because that means they have taken the time to find a phone number and they really want to talk to a person and find out this answer, and that means that they’ve hit other barriers, that it isn’t obvious on the website. It isn’t obvious through other communication methods that we use. So we want to make sure that we’re capturing those things as well.

Dan Titmuss: If you could broadcast one message to executive directors, leadership teams, staff, and boards of thousands of arts and culture and exhibition based organizations, what would it be?

Emily O’Hara: Please don’t forget the people. I think the big thing is, right, making sure that you remember that why we continue to be able to operate is because people are coming to visit us. People are coming through our doors. People are supporting us. And to know that when a guest is asking for something or getting clarification or needing assistance, we are here for them. And so ensuring that we are providing that support and thinking through and really addressing the concerns that exist because we wouldn’t exist without them.

Dan Titmuss: Amazing. I love that. Whenever I go to a zoo, one of the first places I look for on the map is the reptile enclosure or the reptile exhibits. What’s one of your favorite exhibits at the zoo that all of our listeners should go and see?

Emily O’Hara: My favorite place to take a little escape when I’m at the Detroit Zoo is our free flight aviary. It is a walkthrough experience where birds are free to fly all around you. It has two story glass enclosure and tons of plants. You feel like you were completely transformed to a jungle forest, and you hear bird calls, bird songs, and then you start to see them, and that is one of the parts that I actually love about it is you have to slow down to be able to see all of the birds that live inside of there. Because they blend in, or they’re up high, some are down low, and so it really slows you down in a way that I love. I love to be able to slow down and kind of escape time a little bit in there.

Dan Titmuss: Amazing. Emily, thank you so much for being here. I’ve loved this conversation.

Emily O’Hara: Thank you so much, Dan. I appreciate you having me.

Dan Titmuss: Let’s wrap things up with a quick round of CI-lebrity Sightings. Here’s some of our favorite stories about CI clients in the news. First up, Boston’s WBUR reported that the city is expanding its Family Days program, which offers school-aged children and their families free access to cultural institutions twice a month. The program now includes performing arts institutions, including ArtsEmerson, Boston Ballet, and Huntington Theatre. Excellent news, Boston! Next, The Children’s Theater of Cincinnati received a major boost for their capital campaign to restore their historic Emory Theater. An anonymous donor gave $2 million. According to Broadway World, this donation covers half of the remaining funds needed to reach their goal. Way to go! And finally, the San Francisco Symphony and its chorus partnered with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra for a benefit concert supporting those affected by the recent Los Angeles fires. The SF Chronicle reported that nearly 1900 people attended the event. What an incredible example of using the arts to bring people together for a meaningful cause. Huge applause to these organizations for sharing art, support, and inspiration with their communities. Got a story that deserves a shout out? Well, tag us on social and let us know.

Thank you for listening to CI to Eye. This episode was edited and produced by Karen McConarty and co-written by Karen McConarty and myself, Dan Titmuss. Stephanie Medina and Jess Berube are CI to Eye’s designers and video editors, and all work together to create CI’s digital content. Our music is by whoisuzo. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please take a moment to rate us or leave a review. A nice comment goes a long way in helping other people discover CI to Eye and hear from experts in the arts and beyond. If you didn’t enjoy today’s episode, pass it on to all of your enemies. Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok for regular content to help you market smarter. You can also sign up for our newsletter at capacityinteractive.com so you never miss an update. And if you haven’t already, please click the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, stay nerdy.