Marketing, Visitor Experience, and Business Development Vision for the Chicago Botanic Garden
This document addresses the continuing effort to develop the Garden as an institution that 1) welcomes its visitors warmly, 2) provides beauty and enjoyment for those visitors, 3) educates them about and gives them appreciation for plants, 4) increases their awareness of the full scope of the Garden mission, 5) builds loyalty to the Garden, and 6) inspires them to take action in some way that preserves or improves the natural world. It was developed to correlate with the 2010-2020 Strategic Plan and provide a future-state vision of brand standards, guidelines, and recommendations for those who create the Garden’s programs and disseminate its messages.
Central to this paper is the Garden’s mission:
The mission of the Chicago Botanic Garden is to promote the
enjoyment, understanding, and conservation of plants and the natural world.
This statement, adopted by the Board in 2004, grows out of a long tradition that began in 1867 when the Chicago Horticultural Society was organized. At that time, when the city was assimilating tens of thousands of new immigrants and coping with the social problems of tenement neighborhoods, the founders of the Chicago Horticultural Society envisioned an institution that would bring the beauty of plants to the people of the city and enrich civic life. As the years passed, Chicago grew; the Society matured; and its leaders expanded the mission to include an educational component. When the Society and the Cook County Forest Preserve District officially opened the Chicago Botanic Garden in 1972, the Society became a place to visit and broadened its efforts to build public understanding and appreciation of plants and horticulture, and then in XXXX added research and conservation to its mission.