Arboretum San Antonio
Giving Their Vision A Voice
The Challenge:
Arboretum San Antonio is building one of the largest arboreta in Texas: a 200-plus-acre living museum and center for tree research on the site of a former golf course, linked to Salado Creek and the Howard W. Peak Greenway. Cielo Strategy Group has been part of the story since early fall 2023, when the organization’s founding CEO asked us to facilitate a Board session to develop organizational values ahead of its critical milestone: choosing a partner to design the arboretum’s master plan. A project of this scale would shape Arboretum San Antonio for generations, and the Board needed to be unified before it could choose who would help build it. They knew what they wanted to feel when they walked the finished grounds, but hadn’t yet put words to it: the values that would serve as their north stars for vetting and selecting a master plan partner. Once those values pointed the way to a nationally renowned planning partner, Sasaki, in spring 2024, a new challenge took shape. Sasaki needed to move quickly to build a local team that could support a full year of master planning, one that would require deep, sustained community engagement across San Antonio. At the same time, Arboretum San Antonio still needed its everyday communications to keep pace with its growth: website, social media, email, and donor relations. And in early 2025, the organization welcomed a new CEO as its founding CEO retired, adding a leadership transition to an already high-stakes year.
Our Approach:
For the facilitated Board session, our job was to listen for what was already there and reflect it back until it sounded like the arboretum. We facilitated the session, synthesized everything the Board shared into clear values with descriptions, and iterated alongside them until the Board approved the values in mid-fall 2023, just ahead of launching their master plan RFP that winter. We stayed on after the RFP launched, shifting our scope to hands-on marketing and communications support: website updates, social media, email newsletter development, messaging, and donor relations communications alongside the CEO, including thank-you notes and appeal letters. So when Sasaki assembled its local consultant team in spring 2024, Cielo wasn’t a new name. We were chosen as the marketing and communications local lead and managed two partnerships at once: Arboretum San Antonio’s regular communications rhythm and the master plan’s community engagement, so the organization’s voice stayed consistent whether someone met it in a newsletter or a headline. We walked alongside the team through every part of that year: leading the external communications for the master plan’s community engagement, building the email and social strategy, and running the full public relations campaign. We also stayed close through the leadership transition in early 2025, continuing marketing and communications support as the new CEO settled in.
From Our Partner:
The Outcome:
The Board’s values, approved in mid-fall 2023, became the north stars that guided Arboretum San Antonio through its RFP process and its selection of Sasaki that spring. As the local marketing and communications lead for Sasaki’s year-long master planning process, Cielo Strategy Group led every piece of external community engagement communications, including email, social media, and public relations, helping the plan reach more than 18,000 community members through events, focus groups, pop-ups, radio interviews, and surveys. That PR campaign is why Arboretum San Antonio has appeared in the news: coverage included all major local media outlets, such as the San Antonio Report, Texas Public Radio, San Antonio Express-News, radio, television, Architect’s Newspaper, CultureMap San Antonio, among others. In May 2025, Arboretum San Antonio unveiled Branching Generations, the master plan for a 200-plus-acre arboretum linking Salado Creek and the Howard W. Peak Greenway into one of the largest arboreta in the state. Cielo Strategy Group also supported Arboretum San Antonio through a founding CEO’s retirement and a new CEO’s first year, and we’ve continued as their marketing and communications partner ever since, through the master plan’s unveiling and into what comes next.
