A nutritionist’s complexity required more than spreadsheets
Jordyn Nylander, a senior clinical nutritionist at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, doesn’t start with what animals eat. She starts with how they eat. “Every animal has a very unique set of adaptations and challenges,” Nylander explains. “We think about how they chew, how they interact with other animals, the environment they live in—sunlight, shade, temperature. Even the size and presentation of the food matters.”
A giraffe’s height means food has to be prepared and positioned high off the ground to match how it naturally feeds. Each variable shapes a diet plan. Now multiply that level of specificity across 3,000 active diet plans spanning two campuses.
San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA) cares for 15,000+ animals across more than 900 species, many of them endangered. Their mission is life-saving and global: protect and preserve wildlife for future generations.
But for decades, managing nutrition at this level of specificity ran on fragmented systems: hundreds of Excel spreadsheets, a fragile database, radio calls, phone calls, and handwritten notes stored in someone’s pocket.
When a diet changed, that update had to travel across multiple channels, with no guarantee it reached the right person in time. For animals with highly specific needs, that wasn’t just inefficient. It was a risk.
Coordination consumed the time for conservation
The work itself is precise science, but the systems supporting it were fragmented. Nutritionists fielded requests over radio and phone. Diet updates arrived through multiple channels. Warehouse teams weren’t always sure which version was current. Care specialists could discover mid-feed that something had changed.
Highly trained specialists had less time to advance conservation science because they spent time tracking down information, confirming updates, and trying to stay aligned.
A nonprofit constraint became a partnership opportunity
April Dornback, SDZWA’s service desk manager and ServiceNow administrator, saw the problem clearly.
“It was a nightmare,” Dornback says. “Databases that could crash. Hundreds of Excel spreadsheets. Phone calls, radio calls, sticky notes—things written down that weren’t shared across teams.”
The organization needed a unified system where nutritionists, warehouse teams, and care specialists could all work from the same information. So Dornback asked a key question: where were skilled people spending time on work that didn’t require their expertise? The answer was coordination. Instead of adding more people or processes, she focused on removing friction.
ServiceNow.org offered Dornback something rare: enterprise-grade capabilities built for nonprofit constraints—limited budget, limited headcount, mission-first priorities. She had already proven ServiceNow across SDZWA's IT operations. Now she saw an opportunity to extend that foundation into the heart of the mission by building their own custom app on the ServiceNow AI Platform.
Her team built the Wildlife Nutrition Hub using ServiceNow App Engine and Workflow Studio an application designed from the ground up around how SDZWA teams work.
Real-time coordination replaced hours of manual effort
The Wildlife Nutrition Hub connects nutritionists, warehouse teams, and care specialists in a single, shared workflow.
When Nylander updates a diet plan. for example, adjusting feed for Seri, a giraffe in the East Africa habitat, that change is immediately visible to everyone who needs to see it. The warehouse team begins sourcing and preparing food. Care specialists receive updates automatically. By the time feeding happens, everyone is aligned. What once required multiple calls, follow-ups, and manual tracking now happens seamlessly.
“We have a unified space where our teams can see the same information in real time,” Nylander says. “It closes communication gaps and ensures we have the right feed and schedule for every animal.”
Time recovered from coordination went back to conservation work
The operational gains are clear. The impact on the mission is even greater.
With less time spent managing logistics, Nylander and her team can focus on deeper scientific work, like animal genetics, breeding strategies, and long-term species survival.
“The real value of this is giving us back time,” Dornback says. “With the Wildlife Nutrition Hub, we can now have everybody on the same page doing the same thing at the same time and being able to make everything flow together.”
Each year, SDZWA manages more than 400,000 tons of food across its campuses. That effort is now coordinated through a single system—one that not only improves daily operations but also generates insights that support global conservation programs.
Protecting species starts with protecting the systems behind them
“I could work in technology anywhere,” Dornback says. “But I choose to work here because what we do protects species. ServiceNow.org helped make that possible.”
Nylander sees that impact in her daily work.
“The choices we make in wildlife nutrition directly affect conservation efforts around the world,” Nylander says. “When we feed one animal, we’re thinking about populations in the wild for generations to come.”
SDZWA built a system that reflects the complexity of their work and frees their experts to focus on what matters most. Because in conservation, efficiency isn’t the goal. It just helps make the mission possible.