Major funding to master plan your zoo: a more sophisticated approach?

It is too tempting for a zoo organisation, perhaps under fresh management or other new impetus, to move towards a full, long term masterplan without any thought at all as to where major external funding might come from. Only later to start looking around for major funding partners and trying to shoehorn the site's development into programmes not actually designed for it.

Surely it is much more subtle to first survey the political, economic and social agenda currently exciting and motivatin ( or worrying?) decision makers at regional, national or even European levels - the  handful of people  ( senior political and political leaders) who can make your site develop in a way  and at a scale you could never afford to do so alone.

Now, I am not remotely suggesting that a conservation minded zoo betrays its mission and starts ‘building housing estates’ or  something.  But the paths to that very mission, and the ways in which people can engage with the animal and natural world are many, varired and wonderful. Looking creatively at what a zoo organisation can offer to Society at large, and conceiving the organisation's future in an intelligent awareness of macro-issues (whether economic or scientific or community or educational or whatever) has to be a good thing.

 In addition to securing extra resource for your institution to develop, the new concepts that emerge from this cross fertilisation will be richer and more imaginative. And there's another advantage. In becoming involved in issues beyond those of immediate, apparent or even ‘selfish’  relevance to the zoo and aquarium world (i.e. the environment and tourism/ leisure), zoo leaders will  start to become part of that very decision making cadre itself  which they need to influence. 

So new programmes and the new funding that comes with them will  from the outset start to take account of the strengths and possibilities of large audience nature sites in ways not previously possible.