TOBY drives Zoo membership for 4 years

In 2004, I was introduced to the Friends of the Zoo (FOTZ) program at Auckland Zoo, by the then Marketing Manager and my good friend Alistair Kirk. He offered me a membership for my son Blake, who had just turned two, and said "All I need is a photo", to which I replied "Great, I'll email one when I return to the office". This is when Alistair took me to the temporary information centre (the new Zoo entrance way was under construction at the time) and showed me a very antiquated process for producing the Friends of the Zoo passes.

Along with managing the membership program, TOBY has brought a level of understanding about the members' use of the Zoo that was previously unheard of.

It took longer to come up with a name for the modular application we now call TOBY than it did to build a prototype that could achieve all the things that the Zoo could wish for in a cloud-based membership program. The initial version of TOBY:Membership was launched in April 2007 and has run the program every day since then. Being online, one of the first things we were able to do for the Zoo was help with retention. All membership programs suffer from churn - the loss of members at the end of the subscription period - simply because members are not made aware that their membership period is ending, and of course in an internet world, email is a great facilitator of this objective. At the end of the second year of running the program, analysis showed that by using well structured email reminders, we had doubled the retention rate year on year, and have maintained the retention rate since then. The program continues to grow every year and is very important to Auckland Zoo.

It took longer to come up with a name for the modular application we now call TOBY than it did to build a prototype that could achieve all the things that the Zoo could wish for in a cloud-based membership program.

Along with managing the membership program, TOBY has brought a level of understanding about the members' use of the Zoo that was previously unheard of. Simply by instigating barcode scanners at the gate and providing the ability to extract reports on usage and membership activity, Zoo staff now have a much more complete picture of what their FOTZ members do, when they use the Zoo, and how well they respond to targeted marketing initiatives. FOTZ members are invited to special member only events, scanned on entry, and over time, profiles of which events members participate in become more and more valuable. After all, the Zoo has a clearly defined mission and programs like FOTZ are there to support the great conservation work they do in an environment that is becoming tougher to operate in.

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