Denver Zoo Issues Website RFP
Our goals are to be mobile-friendly, Spanish language friendly and make it easier for our guests find the information they are looking for. We wish to accomplish this with a Spanish toggle button, incorporating calendars for events, have embedded video and image gallery capabilities, an easy E-commerce experience and an exclusive membership portal.
Background:
Denver Zoo is one of the most popular zoos in the United States and the most popular paid attraction in Denver with over 2.2 million visitors annually and 64,000 member households including a 25% Hispanic audience. Denver Zoo brings informal science education alive, providing a unique learning experience that sparks an interest in the natural world for visitors and program participants alike. Home to 3,700 animals, representing nearly 600 species, the Zoo is accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), which assures the highest standards of animal care.
A leader in green action, Denver Zoo is the greenest zoo in the country and is dedicated to ensuring the safety of the environment in support of all species by attaining the highest environmental standards. Since 1996, Denver Zoo has participated in over 600 projects, in more than 60 countries, on all seven continents, and commits more than $2 million annually to field conservation.
For over five years, Denver Zoo’s web services have been hosted on Amazon Web Services while the content management system is on Drupal. Just over a year ago, we had a backup failure and lost everything. This caused the site to lose its responsive capabilities and consistent styles. We will be completely redesigning the current website and CMS platform in hopes to stay up to date on the best web practices and bring back our mobile-friendly designs to create an easier user experience for all of our guests.
Denver Zoo is currently working with different third-party sites to supplement our user engagement. To manage our advocacy resources, our government affairs department works with CQ Roll Call on the Engage platform to run our Take Action page. Our development team partners with Community Funded to run crowdfunding campaign on our Make a Gift page. They also use Stelter for our Planned Giving page and work with Blackbaud for their donor database. Our class registration, admission tickets and memberships are currently being sold through Vantix’s ATMS system on our Tickets page. This ticketing system also runs with our new mobile app that launched just last year.
With that, we want to further our mission by allowing an easier and more controlled experience for our ticket sales and program registration, give our members and donors VIP treatment with their own accessible information through a membership portal and allow for our large Hispanic audience to be able to easily translate the content that we share. We hope to do this with a new homepage and 5-10 simple responsive templates on WordPress (designed by Denver Zoo) that can be easily updated and maintained by our external relations staff on a daily basis.
Furthermore, in late 2018, Denver Zoo plans to rebrand and will need to easily change graphics to match the new brand. The selected agency will be developing Denver Zoo’s new website platform, along with reskinning the website when new branding is created in late 2018. The selected agency will not be engaged in either phase of the creative development for the new site or reskin.
Scope of Work:
Denver Zoo will be looking for an agency to help with the following tasks:
- Development of basic website with a homepage and 5-10 simple templates
- Bilingual website WordPress capabilities
- Ecommerce integration
- Membership portal
- Late 2018 style reskin application
- General maintenance of website
- New content upload
Denver Zoo’s talented in-house design team has built out basic wireframes as a guide to follow (wireframes attached). They will also be creating the new design and work closely with the selected agency to develop and implement their designs. The selected agency will collaborate with Denver Zoo staff on best practices to create a new website.
Due Date:
March 1st, 2018
Address:
PR firms with strong pet divisions include 5WPR and Coyne PR.
