This March, Zachary Winfield, Senior Vice President and Harriet Resnick, Vice President joined the APGA Finance & Operations Symposium in Houston to share their business planning expertise with attendees. Read on for highlights from their presentations:
Holiday Lights — Naughty or Nice?
Image credit: Naples Botanical Garden – Johnsonville Night Lights in the Garden
Recently, holiday light show programs have been popping up at gardens all over the country. There’s huge variety in how they are implemented, presented, and leveraged, but one thing is for sure: These events have become staples in the annual programming calendar of many gardens, especially since the pandemic. Are holiday light show programs paying off? And will that trend continue long-term?
During this conversation, Harriet moderated a panel of garden leaders to compare the trends, challenges, and innovations they are experiencing with their holiday light shows.
Takeaways:
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Despite ebbs and flows in attendance and growing competition for leisure time and disposable income, holiday light shows remain a profitable winter program. It’s a powerful way to bring visitors to your garden at a time of year (and time of day) they otherwise wouldn’t show up.
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Rather than focusing primarily on driving more attendance, gardens should look at increasing on-site revenue opportunities and extracting more value from guests who are already through the door.
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Reduce reliance on volunteers for the core business of installation set-up and tear-down; focus on using volunteers more for “add-on” roles, like greeters, rather than core positions. While it may affect the bottom line, it can also increase the professionalism of the event, which may pay off in other ways.
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Visitors want to see something new each year, but they also cherish their traditions. The sweet spot is a thoughtful blend of both.
Harriet Resnick (center) with Holiday Lights panelists
Thank you to our wonderful panelists, who brought great perspectives and data to the table:
- Erin Anderson, Executive Director, Idaho Botanical Garden
- Lisa Medrano, Chief Financial Officer, San Antonio Botanical Garden
- Andrea Nickrent, Vice President & Chief Revenue Officer, Naples Botanical Garden
- Paul Rafac, Executive Vice President & CFO, Chicago Botanic Garden
- Dr. Lynette Zimmerman, Executive Director, Botanica the Wichita Gardens
Integrating Financial Strategy into Capital Planning for Botanical Gardens
Zachary Winfield presenting on ‘Capital is Temporary, Operations are Forever’
In today’s cultural landscape, botanic gardens undergoing master planning must align their financial strategies with their mission to ensure long-term sustainability. Zachary’s session explored revenue strategy as a spectrum — ranging from audience growth on one end to revenue optimization on the other — and why knowing where your garden sits in its market is essential for effective planning.
Takeaways:
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Given inflation and the rising costs, it’s harder than ever to make a discrete, provable financial case for capital projects.
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In an effort to deal with that new reality, organizations need to focus on their primary revenue levers for ensuring financial sustainability. In most cases, the most impactful revenue channel is the front gate.
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Part of credibly assessing the potential for growing admissions revenue is understanding how much attendance you market can support. The use of geolocation analytics is a relatively new tool that organizations can use to complete that analysis.
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The cost of operating a new project is just as important as the cost of building it. Careful and sober analysis of the true operating expenses an organization is likely to bear when considering expansion projects helps ensure sustainability in the long-term.
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If those analyses are completed during master plan phases (as they should be), organizations can help offset those future costs by adding endowment offsets to their capital campaigns. “Endowment offsets” are dollars above and beyond the construction cost that are allocated towards quasi-endowments intended to fund the future operations of the project via their proceeds.
Need help with your financial strategy? Send us a message.
Canopy was proud to be a sponsor of the 2026 APGA Finance & Operations Symposium. We look forward to seeing everyone in June at the Annual Conference in San Francisco!
