Visitor Operations Manager

Description:

We are looking for an enthusiastic, motivated individual with excellent people and organisational skills to lead our visitor team (cafe, shop, visitor experience) at The Lodge and Fowlmere. Your job will be to lead the development, integration and delivery of all the visitor-facing elements on our two reserves, with the aim of creating an exemplar visitor experience that maximises support for nature. This important role, based at RSPB The Lodge, Sandy but also covering Fowlmere, is key to delivering a great welcome to around 100k visitors across two reserves.

The Lodge is a unique reserve, also the RSPB's UK headquarters. There are trails exploring heathland, woodland, exemplar wildlife gardens, and ancient heritage; it is home to Nightjar, Hobby, Natterjack Toad and Dartmoor Ponies. It attracts over 60k visitors, about 50% of whom are families.

Fowlmere, near Cambridge, is a jewel of a wetland where around 25k visitors enjoy exploring reedbeds and wet woodlands, and seeing Water Vole, Marsh Harrier, Brown Trout and fenland flowers.

Experience essential for this role includes: managing a team and building strong working relationships; developing income streams, monitoring finances and visitor data; developing successful events; overseeing publicity and interpretation; managing volunteers. The role involves working to targets and will involve some weekend working and bank holidays.

This is a great opportunity for someone to have a big positive impact on RSPB income and support, building a cohesive visitor team, and engaging and inspiring both new and traditional audiences at The Lodge & Fowlmere nature reserves. There will be opportunities for wider working in collaboration with other RSPB reserves in the area.

Essential Skills, Knowledge And Experience

• Excellent verbal and written communications skills.
• A natural leader who can build and maintain strong working relationships, and motivate and inspire people at all levels.
• Sound understanding of systems and procedures necessary to run a commercial visitor operation.
• Sound knowledge of how to deliver the highest standard of customer care resulting in exemplar visits.
• Experience of successfully recruiting, leading and developing a team of volunteers and staff to deliver a joined up, coherent and high-quality visitor offer for all visitors to the reserve.
• Experience of pro-actively promoting the visitor offer to target audiences.
• Proven track record of setting and achieving agreed targets and KPI’s for income generation, quality of visit and footfall targets for the reserve.
• Experience of maximising opportunities for visitor engagement, delivering brand and converting visits into support (e.g. support for RSPB’s Saving Nature Strategy).
• Experience of organising events and activities with supporting documentation to ensure relevant RSPB procedures and legal compliance requirements are met.
• Basic computer literacy.