Discover Top Posts Tagged with #stumpedartist

Wow, i'm a fan now. Love your shading and line work!

Oh my gosh, thank you so much!!

So zoos need better PR departments :O?

Absolutely. Or, more to my opinion, they need to change how their PR departments frame the work they do.

Zoo PR is really great at advertising zoos. What they’re not good at doing - and what is becoming so much more important due to the omnipresence of smartphone technology - is facilitating intimate and authentic engagement with a zoos’ online audience. They’re great at showing you teasers of cute things and selling you the idea of coming to visit the zoo, but that’s not what social media is /for/ anymore and I personally think they really need to pivot.

There are facilities I absolutely love in person whose social media I can’t stand to engage with because it comes off as super commercial or hyper-edited. If I’m going to a zoos’ FB page, I want to know about the work they do: how they care for their animals, the value of the work they do, the positions they hold on various topics. Some zoos do a pretty good job of communicating that, but a lot don’t. (And for the most part, what does get repeated on topics I want to see are semi-identical talking points reiterated from messaging pushed by accrediting groups, which makes things feel very cookie-cutter).

Let me tell you, there are so many things I learn at conferences that leave my jaw on the floor. They’re stories of conservation and research and really incredible work with their animals that I’d kill to tell... but the zoo has decided to not talk about them, or only talk about them in person. I’ve heard various reasons for that: sometimes the PR people don’t think it’s important and just want to focus on cute animals, sometimes the zoo is afraid they’ll make themselves an animal rights target for talking about details regarding charismatic megafauna... but it all brings the same result, that those stories don’t get told.

One of the reason a lot of animal sanctuaries are so successful on social media (even the ones with well-known problems!) is because they’re so open and transparent. If you’re taking videos of your animal care every day and posting content where you go into detail about the social interactions between your animals constantly, your audience has so much more of an intimate understanding of the work you do. Businesses and social movements are successful in this era when they ascribe to philosophies of radical transparency and accountability, and so that puts pressure on other areas where ethics are a major concern (like animal care!) to do the same. The current zoological industry in the United States isn’t there yet. As much as there’s a push for transparency, it’s only transparency to a degree - there’s still this sense within the field that since zoos are the experts they don’t need to share everything they do or their reasons for doing it with the public, and that there are things about animal care the public “shouldn’t” see. This isn’t because they’re doing shady things out of the public eye - it’s just tradition, and “that’s how we’ve always done it.” I find it extremely frustrating, because where people fall in love with the work they do is when I do get to tell them those intimate, inside stories that maybe aren’t so grande but genuinely do show how much those animals are cared for. That’s why I fell in love with the field.

In a world where people spend so much of their time online, the zoo industry can’t afford to continue only utilizing their PR and social media as marketing tools that bring people to the physical facility. There’s a huge potential audience online of people who, as all the reader interaction on this blog has taught me, desperately want to support zoos but may not be able to actually visit one. By not giving the online audience a similarly authentic experience with the zoo online to what they’d get in person, zoos shoot themselves in the foot: if, like what I do on this blog, you give people that option for intimate access they will engage and they’ll do it with so much passion. Current PR tactics work okay for bringing people into the facilities, but I feel they’re not very successful at reaching younger internet generations who value authenticity, intimacy, and transparency in the entities they support. Sure, we’ll watch a cute animal video as it scrolls by - but how much does that cute, fluffy video encourage us to actually click through, get engaged, and truly care?

So yeah, it’s a field that does incredibly good work and is astoundingly bad as a whole at actually telling people about most of it.

#zoo politics #stumpedartist