September 18, 2003 | Read Time: 6 minutes
When Willie B., Zoo Atlanta’s world-famous 41-year-old gorilla, died three years ago, he was so beloved that his obituary made the local newspaper’s front page. The gorilla had come a long way: from Cameroon to a small cage in the city’s old Municipal Zoo, and then finally, in the 1980s, he was moved into posh rain-forest digs at Zoo Atlanta’s reconfigured facility.
Since his death, Zoo Atlanta has fallen on hard financial times, and not even the loan of a pair of pandas from a Chinese zoo has been able to reverse things. In the past three years, attendance and donations have been on the decline, hurt by an economic downturn and the zoo’s inability to draw repeat visitors, a situation that may soon become even harder to reverse as another popular animal attraction comes to town: The city recently broke ground on an aquarium, whose $200-million construction bill is being sponsored by Bernard Marcus, Home Depot’s co-founder.
Now, the zoo is looking to a former Coca-Cola marketing executive named Dennis W. Kelly to administer the elixir of life.
Mr. Kelly, an Atlanta native who has no previous experience with animals or with running a nonprofit organization, is the new chief executive officer of Zoo Atlanta. He replaced Terry Maple, who led the zoo for 20 years and left to develop an animal-study center at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Mr. Kelly, 50, spent the past four years as head of the Green Mountain Energy Company, a 600,000-customer company in Austin, Tex., that buys and resells power supplied by renewable or “clean” energy sources. Mr. Kelly was credited with expanding the entrepreneurial energy company from sales of $60,000 annually to $250-million and getting large companies, including British Petroleum, to invest in Green Mountain.
While Mr. Kelly brought the experience of running a business to Zoo Atlanta, it was his marketing expertise that prompted the nonprofit group to seek him out.
“I was surprised as anyone when the recruiter called me, but they explained the board was looking for a business person who was good with numbers and marketing,” he says. “They wanted someone who was interested in leading a team that was good at running the zoo from the animal side, but wasn’t as strong at telling our story to visitors and members, or to potential donors.”
And when it comes to marketing, Mr. Kelly has plenty of experience. While at Coca-Cola, the Harvard Business School graduate became the first general manager of the company’s division that promoted powerhouse brands like Fruitopia, PowerAde, and Nestea in bottles. Later, he ran the marketing operation for Coca-Cola Europe.
Mr. Kelly, whose annual compensation at the zoo is $200,000, is going to need all of his marketing savvy to reverse the slide at Zoo Atlanta, which has not been able to attract major attention to itself since adding the pair of giant pandas, Lun Lun and Yang Yang, in late 1999. In 2000, the first year after the pandas arrived, attendance soared to nearly 1 million. It has declined steadily since then. In 2001, Zoo Atlanta ran a $5.7-million budget deficit, leading to layoffs and higher admission prices. This year, its budget is down to $16-million, from $19-million in 2002.
In an interview, The Chronicle spoke with Mr. Kelly about the job:
What is your assessment of the zoo?
The zoo itself is in great shape. I am convinced that we are doing a really great job of the basics of running a zoo: animal care, our displays, care of the customer, and maintaining the exhibits. I’m also very impressed with the staff here. One of the great legacies Dr. Maple left us with is the actual managerial and curatorial staff and the animal-management staff.
But the opportunities are that we haven’t talked about what a great place this is. Our exit surveys have told us that our visitors love us when they come out, but we have been an eminently postpone-able visit. The opportunity is to create some urgency about coming to the zoo.
How do you market Zoo Atlanta with no new exhibits?
I have a belief that just having “something new” as a marketing strategy is not sustainable. It may be that the principal marketing strategy is to always add something new, but a better marketing strategy is to consistently communicate the benefits that you offer.
We’ve spent very little money on marketing since the panda launch. When you get into a downward spiral, the reaction of some organizations is to cut marketing. That’s one of the easiest things to cut. But it’s also one of the most dangerous in terms of the long-term health of an organization.
One of the first things I did was employ a coupon program that gave $5 off to anyone who visited our Web site or clipped it out of the paper. It really turned around three of our trends: attendance, membership, and revenue. Our attendance had been falling, our revenue had fallen, our memberships were down. For the last month and a half, we’ve been above last year.
You’ve never worked for a nonprofit group before. What attracted you to the job?
It was very attractive to me as a native Atlantan. I grew up with Willie B., too. But it was also attractive to be working in an environment where my strengths are most needed. At Green Mountain, I was out selling the corporation a lot of the time, trying to convince BP and Nuon to be investors in the dream. At the zoo, I’m also going to be raising support. It’s donations and contributions, but I think the similarities are striking between this venture and raising equity investments. This is a form of debt and equity investing in the community. The return is the health of our community, biodiversity, and the health of our children in terms of knowledge or education.
Is Zoo Atlanta in a position to compete with the aquarium?
We want the aquarium to be successful. We think they can really help us and we can really help them. We’re both about conservation, and there’s really no reason we can’t have a one-plus-one-makes-three-type equation. They are independent and separate from us, and that’s very healthy.
ABOUT DENNIS W. KELLY, CEO OF ZOO ATLANTA
Education: Earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1976 and a master’s in business administration from Harvard Business School in 1981.
Previous jobs: Served as chief marketing officer of Coca-Cola Europe and as chief executive officer of the Green Mountain Energy Company.
Books he read most recently: Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, by Janisse Ray; Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond; Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer.
