Leading indicators: Animal welfare perceptions

Though life in the C-suite can feel wild and wooly, most CFOs don’t literally have to worry about how active their lions are in the summertime.

Unless, that is, they’re CFO of the Denver Zoo.

Animals’ activity levels affect visitors’ impression about how well they’re being taken care of, Charlie Wright, former CFO and treasurer of the Denver Zoo and the Colorado Zoological Trust, explained to attendees of the 2024 IMA Americas Accounting and Finance Conference. And such impressions matter to the zoo, so they’re one of the main KPIs Wright and his team tracked.

In fact, such nonfinancial KPIs became increasingly important to Wright over his nine-year tenure as CFO. During a strategic planning process, zoo leadership “had eight or nine very important things we wanted to accomplish” and tied a metric to each one, said Wright, who recently retired. Only two of the nine metrics were financial. “And when I started…9 out of 9 were financial,” he recalls.

One such metric was called the Perceived Animal Care Rating, or PACR score, which the zoo established by surveying visitors after they left. The zoo’s animal care standards are evaluated by experts as part of its accreditation process for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, Wright said, but it also wanted to see what visitors thought.

Zoos have undergone dramatic changes in the past 20 to 30 years, Wright said, because “many people thought zoos were not good to animals…that they put big animals in cages and that they were cruel to them.” Zoos responded by placing more emphasis on conservation and “transforming facilities and programs to make sure that we are giving the best animal care possible.” Since 2000, for instance, the Denver Zoo built large new, award-winning exhibits for its lions and elephants, Wright said.

PACR scores gave the zoo a way to see whether its efforts were making a difference with visitors. What Wright and his team found was that visitors’ impressions of animal care didn’t always align with the zoo’s own. Often, they found, the general public equated animals’ activity levels with quality of care. PACR scores dropped in summer when animals were sleepier.

“When it’s 96 degrees in Colorado, animals feel like human animals and they want to not do too much and be in the shade,” Wright said. “And then the public thinks, ‘Oh, there’s something wrong with these animals.’”

What the zoo then did to correct these perceptions, among other things, was to put up signs telling visitors to expect animals to be less active on hot days, and to know that their health wasn’t affected.

To “become a better CFO,” Wright said, be sure to focus on nonfinancial measures as well. “If you’re going to have a strategic plan and stick to it,” he said, “you’ve got to measure something and be true to it.”