Brookfield Zoo Chicago takes a walk on the mobile side with Contentful

Brookfield Zoo Chicago, the largest zoo in the Chicago metropolitan area, has been delighting visitors with its 235-acre campus since 1945. No two days at the zoo are exactly alike, as animal needs, habitat maintenance, and weather are ever-changing. Because guests plan their trips around this information, keeping Brookfield Zoo Chicago’s website up to date is essential, helping set accurate expectations. But the zoo’s outdated legacy content management system (CMS) made keeping guests updated a cumbersome, time-consuming process.

Over time, the platform’s shortcomings stacked up. The website lacked clear navigation and intuitive search, which meant a lot of the content Brookfield Zoo Chicago created — from information on conservation efforts to animal profiles – was difficult for visitors to discover. Additionally, the experience didn’t translate well on mobile devices, which accounted for 85% of the zoo’s traffic. Visitors struggled to access maps and program schedules, making it hard to discover everything it had to offer. 

It was time for a change. The zoo needed a platform that would help them achieve their mission of inspiring conservation leadership by connecting people to wildlife and nature, not one that got in the way of it. With help from Dogstudio, a multidisciplinary creative studio (part of Dept) and Contentful Partner, they replatformed to Contentful from Salesforce.

Finding a platform built to adapt

When it came to selecting an alternative CMS, Brookfield Zoo Chicago knew it needed a solution built for efficiency. Its website spans thousands of pages across categories such as Visit, Conserve, Explore, and Support — it's a lot for a lean marketing team to manage. A lot of that content is reused across multiple pages. With their old CMS, changes to this content had to be manually updated in each location.

“The zoo is home to many endangered species that have Species Survival Plans, which are conservation plans coordinated with zoos and aquariums across the country. Even though the language describing these plans is the same, our old CMS required us to retype it into every applicable species page, which added a considerable amount of time to already busy schedules,” said Allie Gospel, Performance Marketing Manager at Brookfield Zoo Chicago.

Contentful offered a more efficient approach to this, decoupling content from design, allowing content to be managed centrally and reused wherever it is needed — making it ideal for managing experiences that need to be delivered across multiple channels, like web and mobile. 

Making agile content management second nature

In early 2026, Brookfield Zoo Chicago launched its Contentful-powered digital experience. The impact this had on content management efficiency was immediate. Now, the team can quickly update recurring content, like those Species Survival Plans, once and see the changes populate across multiple pages, saving the team approximately 5 hours per week. They can also update content faster and with fewer steps than before.

“The biggest improvement has been in how we manage events. We created a calendar system that automatically lists recurring programs with an override system that allows us to update or cancel them in near real time, as was the case during a recent thunderstorm,” shared Gospel.

Integrating the Zoo’s library of visual assets has improved as well, freeing up the marketing team from overreliance on designers. The team can easily search for existing assets and add alt text to make visual content more accessible to visitors and discoverable to search engines. Another benefit of the new platform is that the marketing team can be more autonomous in how they manage imagery for web and mobile, making for faster publishing and less work for design. 

Creating a wildly better mobile experience

Visitors are reaping the benefits of the replatform as well. The new experience is more responsive and easier to navigate, adapting layouts for smaller, mobile screens rather than simply stacking desktop content into a lengthy scroll. Contentful also gave Brookfield Zoo Chicago the flexibility to pair its content platform with Algolia, an AI search technology solution that indexes content to deliver instant search results, making it easier for visitors to actually find what they’re interested in.

The property map and schedule of activities are also optimized for mobile, helping visitors take advantage of all Brookfield Zoo Chicago has to offer, from its restaurants and gift shops to the 500+ species of animals that call the zoo home in a more accessible and intuitive format.  

Visitors are also having an easier time navigating the zoo’s educational content, namely conservation pages. In the past, many of its conservation-related pages had almost no page views; now they’ve gained traction. 

Exploring new ways to improve their digital habitat

Today, change is still a constant at Brookfield Zoo Chicago, but how the team manages it is wildly different. With a flexible, omnichannel content foundation in place, they can keep pace with day-to-day changes while finding new ways to help visitors connect more deeply with the Zoo and its mission.

The impact extends beyond making the visitor experience easier to manage. The new site also better reflects Brookfield Zoo Chicago’s identity and strengthens the digital presence, supporting its broader goals.

“As a whole, the new website is a better representation of who we are as an institution, and everyone’s ecstatic. It's also pretty and professional, which has been really great for building trust and bolstering our reputation as we fundraise more and more,” noted Gospel.

With many of the challenges that prompted the replatform now resolved, the team can turn its attention from fixing what wasn’t working to imagining what could come next.

“So many of the issues we wanted to correct got fixed by replatforming and launching the new site,” Gospel said. With a modern digital foundation in place, Brookfield Zoo Chicago is ready to evolve its visitor experience for years to come.