John Regan Associates - External funding for zoos, botanical gardens & aquaria

When I was a child, I used to fantasise about introducing a host of exciting exotic species to British farms. Why, I thought, cannot we ride zebras or tapirs, as well as horses?   If you could domesticate the ancestors of cattle and sheep, why not all those other marvellous grazing species.  A boring old ‘ordinary’ [...]

Well you may be able to name quite a few, if you actually work in the field, but figures that are recognisable at all to the public or the media..? Of course there was one in the past, Gerald Durrell, amongst other things, perhaps the  UK zoo world’s most sucessful marketeer.  Because he ‘got it’.  Ultimately, [...]

How might you persuade some external authority to provide some of the capital investment…? And since we are going to change ‘the zoo’, we had better define the widest possible common denominator definition.  So whatever else this new zoo might be, this is a public site allowing access to animal species maintained ‘ex situ’, okay..? [...]

When one seeks major funding, one needs somehow a big idea that keys into some macro-political agenda. How can your project help someone in authority tick a given box – perhaps in way that nobody else can…? In terms of EU funding, it seems to me there is an important, fundamental idea that Europe’s zoos would be [...]

The word ‘zoo’ is  a great word!  It is short, exciting (makes you think of ‘zoom’…), visually and typographically distinct. If an advertising  copywriter were tasked to come up with a name for some new product  from scratch ( …a kind of shampoo, a new form of insurance policy, a thing for getting stones out [...]

We are aware that much of the zoo and aquaria audience is driven by the interest of children (  – I remember some interesting research years ago that showed in fact that it is young girls in particular that disproportionately stimulate a decision to visit). We are also know that inevitably many people cannot but help but view the animal [...]

Are zoos and aquaria perceived by the outside world as sufficiently different to one another?  If not, do we lose ‘out of area’ visitors and funding potential, because we are seen as having little to offer that is part of the particular authentic ‘flavour’ of that part of the world? The fact is,  from within [...]

To the best of my knowledge there is no animal collection in the world that takes the idea of evolution as its overall theme, although we do have a creationist zoo here in the UK, and I am pretty sure several in the USA ( to be clear, I am with Voltaire in defending the right [...]

The word ‘zoo’ is  a great word!  It is short, exciting (makes you think of ‘zoom’…), visually and typographically distinct. If an advertising  copywriter were tasked to come up with a name for some new product  from scratch ( …a kind of shampoo, a new form of insurance policy, a thing for getting stones out [...]

Before modern times, in the middle ages,  we did not have zoos ( well, except for royal menageries).  Neither did we have sports stadia,  nor parks, nor museums,  nor concert halls,  nor art galleries, nor science centres, nor community  centres, etc What we did have was….. cathedrals.  Cathedrals were the great aspirational  communal project.  Cathedrals offered spaces where ordinary [...]