Like much of the world, when George Jacob sized up the shutdown of travel in March 2020 due to fast-rising COVID-19 cases, he hoped for the best.
“We thought it would be a matter of a few weeks, but then we saw we were in for a long haul,” says Jacob, president and CEO of BayEcotarium, a watershed conservation group with seven branches based in San Francisco. The branch most active in the tourism community is the Aquarium of the Bay (California’s only Smithsonian Affiliated aquarium), located at Pier 39.
When the depth and length of the pandemic became apparent, Jacob and Paul Nakamoto, the organization’s vice president (and past chair of the NTA board of directors) understood that their aquarium would welcome very few tourists—and no school groups—for the foreseeable future.
“With the chokehold on revenue, we faced a bit of a panic,” Jacob says. “Unlike a larger institution, we didn’t have an endowment to help us meet costs, so we rolled out massive furloughs. It was one of the toughest days in the 24 years of the aquarium.”
Jacob says job cuts couldn’t go too deep, though. “Our animals need specialized care and a constant supply of specific food. We retained our core team and assured that animal care was a top priority.”
Jacob and his team also worked on raising cash and further lowering expenses. They arranged rent deferments and restructured debt, and Jacob conducted a fundraising blitz that produced a million dollars in less than a month. And after securing funds through the federal Paycheck Protection Program, the remaining staff got creative.
“We designed some masks that we sold online, and that was part of our campaign to support the aquarium,” Jacob says. “We had masks with fabulous designs of sea lions, river otters, jellyfish, and more.”
Even with donations, PPP funds, and money from mask sales, the aquarium needed more revenue to outlast the seemingly interminable shutdown, so the organization summoned its most valuable resource: George Jacob. A globally renowned museologist, Jacob has served as the founding director of four museums and has completed more than 100 diverse museum project assignments. To help his own organization, Jacob made his expertise available to the rest of the world.
“We were invited to be the functional designers for the National Aquarium of Norway, the Bergen Aquarium,” Jacob says. “In record time we generated a plan that is creative and comprehensive. It’s a spectacular project.”
