On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez struck a reef in the Prince William Sound, spilling 11 million gallons of oil into its waters and ultimately staining nearly 1,500 miles of Alaska’s shoreline. For a few weeks, the nation’s attention was focused on Alaska and its wildlife: Pictures of oil-soaked seabirds led nightly newscasts, and opinion pages were filled with worry over the fate of southeast Alaska’s fragile ecosystem. For most in the lower 48 states, the concern faded with time, replaced by fresher crises, closer to home. But not in Alaska, where locals faced a Herculean cleanup and long-term concerns over the health of their waters and sea life. The oil spill revealed how little scientists knew about life in the Gulf of Alaska; the recovery underscored how much a central facility was needed for the care of sick and injured wildlife.

Enter the Seward Association for the Advancement of Marine Science (SAAMS). Formed in 1988 by a coalition of marine scientists and bolstered by a post-Valdez influx of concerned citizens, SAAMS campaigned for a world-class facility dedicated to marine research, wildlife rehabilitation, and public education on the banks of Resurrection Bay. Members made their case well enough to receive a $26 million allocation from the Exxon Valdez settlement fund; a collection of grants, revenue bonds, and private and corporate donations provided the rest of the money needed to build the $56 million center. The city of Seward donated seven waterfront acres adjacent to a smaller research facility, and in 1998 the Alaska SeaLife Center opened its doors to the public.

Under the Sea

Five years later, the Alaska SeaLife Center has hosted nearly 1 million visitors. It’s a beautiful place—sleek and graceful, and well-designed—that engages visitors with exhibits on Alaskan marine life. Its three main animal habitats—sea lion, seal, and seabird—are supplemented by dozens of smaller fish tanks, a touch tank Discovery Pool, an outdoor observation deck, and a series of interpretive stations. Its newest exhibit, “The Bering Sea,” opened in March, complete with a schooling tank, a mock fishing boat, and interactive elements designed to attract both young and old.

And yet the first thing staff will want to tell you is, “We’re not SeaWorld.”

No, it’s not SeaWorld. There is no Orca show, no IMAX theater, no buttery popcorn. The exhibits are focused more on education than entertainment; the nonprofit SeaLife Center is, at heart, a research and rehabilitation center. In addition to those 900,000+ visitors, the SeaLife Center has hosted 50 research projects and responded to more than 200 injured or stranded animals. As many as 30 scientists are based at the SeaLife Center at any one time; among their projects is an investigation into the startling decline of Steller sea lions and harbor seals in local waters. The rehab team works tirelessly in the hope that, one day, they’ll be able to let their critters go.

But while the SeaLife Center is in many ways focused on conservation, it faces the same central dilemma as SeaWorld, private aquariums, and other for-profit attractions: how to get more people in the door. Recognizing that it’s overly reliant on government funding, the SeaLife Center is working hard to increase front-end revenue, even in the face of Alaska’s short tourist season, Seward’s tiny size, and the center’s lack of name recognition. In short, the SeaLife Center is looking for ways to broaden its appeal without compromising its scientific mission. This challenge above all others will determine the fate of the center.

The SeaLife Center has a finance director, a corporate affairs director, a sales manager, a public relations specialist, and more: There’s a whole team of folks devoted to bringing more money into the center. The SeaLife Center staff welcomed 154,000 visitors last year, but know they could get more, and it’s up to this crew to figure out how.

“I take it personally when people aren’t coming through the door,” says Carl Stevens, the Alaska SeaLife Center’s finance director. He means it: Unlike many of his peers in the non-profit world, Stevens’s contract is structured so that a portion of his salary is incentive based.

Staying Afloat

Initially, attendance was the least of the SeaLife Center’s concerns. The original business plan projected 300,000 visitors annually and predicted that money brought in from the public would help finance the center’s research. With attendance much lower than anticipated—mostly due to miscalculations about the number of visitors the center would draw from the Alaskan cruise ship industry—that model has been reversed. Of the SeaLife Center’s $11 million yearly operating budget, more than $8 million comes from federal appropriations and government research grants. The “front of the house”—ticketing and the gift shop—brings in less than a quarter of the SeaLife Center’s revenue, not nearly enough to keep the doors open to a world-class marine science lab.

“It’s the research grants,” Stevens admits, “that are allowing the facility to exist.”

While grateful for the generous government funding (not to mention the $26 million in seed money from the Valdez fund), the staff members realize it’s not a sustainable business plan. Grant monies are notoriously fickle and often come with a long list of restrictions, requiring that only a certain percentage can be used for overhead and administration. Monies from sales, ticketing, corporate partnerships, and private donations, on the other hand, are unrestricted. The SeaLife Center can do whatever it wants with its front-end money—design a new exhibit, pay salaries, launch a marketing campaign—and it is plain that unrestricted revenue is crucial to the growth and vitality of the center.

In its effort to draw more customers, the Alaska SeaLife Center has promoted its role as a research facility. Rather than lament its scientific mission—with its high overhead, its restricted monies, its insistence that animals are more than showpieces—the SeaLife Center has chosen to make research the cornerstone of its marketing efforts. The staff recognizes that having world-class research and rehabilitation facilities on the grounds distinguishes them from most aquariums, and they intend to take advantage of that fact.

Their science-centered approach becomes most evident when you consider something the SeaLife Center doesn’t do: It doesn’t schedule animal feedings. In trying to recreate natural feeding conditions, the center has opted to feed its animals sporadically, anywhere from one to six times daily, in varying amounts. No wild seal, it’s pointed out, ever gets his meals every two hours on the hour. The SeaLife Center will announce the feedings, but it does not schedule them or post a list of feeding times by the entrance. While some visitors are disappointed—animal feedings are a highlight of many aquarium visits—many others are impressed by the dedication of the center staff to replicating the wild as closely as possible.

The SeaLife Center also offers four daily behind-the-scenes tours, allowing small groups to visit the labs and learn more about the research that goes on at the facility. Priced at $5 and limited to 12 people a tour, they are regular sellouts. “People love them,” says Education Director Amy Haddow. “They have a tremendously positive response.”

In addition, there are a number of special sessions available by reservation. Visitors can sign up for a “Bird Brain” sea bird encounter or a “Jet Set” octopus encounter (a program that includes a squid dissection). More adventurous souls can try the “Scoop on Poop,” sifting through pre-cleaned scat samples to learn a little something about the diet and nutritional needs of sea lions. And on about 75 nights a year, the center hosts school groups as part of its popular “Nocturne” program—for $40 a head, students get dinner, breakfast, educational programs, and the chance to sleep next to the sea lion habitat. (The center hosts about 3,000 kids a year as part of its Nocturne program.)

Still, it doesn’t take reservations, $40, or scat samples to get a feel for the SeaLife Center’s scientific focus. All you have to do is walk in the door. The exhibits are fun, engaging, and interactive—“anything [visitors] can touch and do constitutes successful components,” says Haddow. One of the most distinctive elements in the center is the Chiswell Island exhibit, which is little more than a live camera trained on a wild sea lion rookery some four miles out to sea. It is simple, small, and often uneventful, but it bears the unmistakable stamp of authenticity: Those are wild sea lions, and the folks in the labs downstairs are doing their best to save them from extinction. Few aquariums can offer such a direct link to cutting-edge marine research.

And while the SeaLife Center surely wants people to know what’s going on inside its doors, the staff is even more attuned to teaching visitors what’s going on outside their doors, below the murky waters of the Alaskan Sea. It’s a vibrant, dynamic world down there, and if the SeaLife Center can make that point, it’s done a large part of its job. “A lot of our mission,” Haddow says, “is just trying to get people interested, to get them to care about what’s under the water.”

Getting the Word Out

Of course, great programs and engaging exhibits don’t mean much if there’s no one there to notice, and attracting visitors has been a problem from the start. One barrier is Seward’s tiny size: The port town is home to only 3,000 year-round residents. So if 150,000 visitors a year sounds like a small number, consider it this way: The SeaLife Center draws 5,000 visitors for every Seward resident. (If Six Flags Astroworld matched that ratio, it would get 10 billion visitors a year.) Despite its small size, Seward is an ideal location for the center, both for its access to marine life and because it’s situated on highway, railroad, and cruise ship lines. Not many coastal towns in Alaska have the same advantages.

The SeaLife Center’s marketing efforts are aimed at both Alaskan residents and out-of-state visitors. Within Alaska, the SeaLife Center has turned to a number of nontraditional advertising sources, largely eschewing print ads in favor of well-placed brochures, radio spots, coupons, and slide advertisements in cinemas as far away as Anchorage. It also enjoys a fair amount of free press—a beached whale or rescued seal can generate several days of positive media coverage across the state.

Out-of-state promotions are geared toward drawing more visitors to the Kenai Peninsula. The SeaLife Center staff knows that its aquarium is not a destination by itself. “If people are traveling through Alaska and they’re going to Anchorage and Denali, and they’re not planning to come to Seward for any other reason,” notes Haddow, “they won’t get in their car and drive to get over here.”

On the other hand, she says, “if someone’s already coming to Seward, and especially if it happens to rain outside, there’s not a whole lot else going on.” “Once you’re here,” echoes Stevens, “we’re one of the best attractions, and one of the lowest priced.” As a result, the SeaLife Center has teamed with local businesses to promote Seward and the Kenai Peninsula. Rather than spending $2,500 to run a small ad in the back of Sunset magazine, as the SeaLife Center once did, it’s partnering with other attractions to buy larger ads targeted more specifically at would-be tourists, extolling the virtues of its particular corner of Alaska. (It’s a very different problem than the one faced by park operators in, say, Orlando, who don’t need to convince people to come to town so much as to come to their attraction once they arrive.) What the SeaLife Center doesn’t want, Stevens notes, is people picking up an ad and saying, “Where the heck is Seward? Is that in Nebraska somewhere?”

If it seems a bit unseemly for a nonprofit research and rehabilitation station to be so driven by numbers, it’s clearly a reality for the SeaLife Center. While there are occasional grumblings from the scientific staff about the glossy nature of SeaLife Center promotions, everyone realizes that it’s for the good of the center as a whole. “The reason we’re here is because we’re trying to make the world a better place,” Haddow says. “We want to teach people about marine science, get them excited about what goes on here and about this facility that we’re very proud of. But we can’t do that if we’re not sustainable in some way.”

Ah, sustainability: a buzzword if ever there was one, and for good reason. Will the SeaLife Center’s invigorated marketing efforts pay off, bringing in unrestricted funds and allowing the center to flourish? Only time will tell, but the SeaLife Center seems to be on the right track. Haddow and Stevens are right, of course: No one will come to Alaska just for the SeaLife Center, and it will never be SeaWorld. But if the center can get those who are in Alaska to drop by, and give them an experience both enjoyable and educational, reputation and revenue should continue to grow.

The dark cloud of the Exxon Valdez spill doesn’t have many silver linings, but the Alaska SeaLife Center is one: Staff members care, so that we might too, so that our children, and their children after them, might get the chance to do the same. If it takes a slick PR staff and a few bean counters to reach that goal, so be it.