Best Concepts: Aramark’s Dinopoly helps University of Alabama students get to know their dining options

It’s a problem many large campus dining programs face—how do you educate students on what you can offer them in terms of meal and snack choices? Sure, there are orientation tours, informative literature and elaborate website directories, but how much fun are they?

At the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, the Aramark team came up with a creative alternative—what if getting familiar with the campus’ over two dozen dining locations can be turned into a game complete with prizes?

Hence Dinopoly, characterized as a “VISIT-EAT-WIN” game, gives freshmen students, and the campus, a fun way to find every dining location on campus, from dining halls and retail locations to convenience stores and coffee shops, on the first day of school. For its creativity, Dinopoly has been named the Best Marketing Concept category winner in the 2023 FM Best Concept Awards program.

“The reason we know it is a winner is because upperclassmen have told us even as juniors and seniors on campus, they never knew of some of the locations, until now,” wrote Bama Dining/Aramark Marketing Manager Robin Wells in her Best Concept nomination of Dinopoly. “They wish they had this game when they were freshmen.”

To play, a student gets a game board showing the 25 dining locations on campus, then visits each to ask for a Bama Dinopoly sticker that is applied to the board. Each dining location has a unique sticker, and no purchase is necessary to get one. Once the student collects a sticker from all 25 locations on the board, they bring their completed game board or sticker collection to the Bama Dining marketing office to collect a prize.

The prizes have included a mini Coca-Cola refrigerator, Bluetooth speaker and 50 free VEO bike minutes. The five grand prizes are awarded in order of receipt of completed maps, and there are another thousand prizes just for playing as the game continued through fall and spring semesters.

While playing, students can take advantage of the new 360-degree virtual tours available on the location pages of the Bama Dining website to scout each dining location before they go to see what it looks like inside. The game is open to all students and last year ran from Aug. 17, 2022, through May 23, 2023 (or until the prizes ran out).

“This kind of immediate gratification not only allows the students to feel comfortable knowing where they can go and what their options are, but it makes parents feel good about getting the most value out of the meal plans they purchased,” Wells noted. “Students get to see all the options. It is a value added, fun way, of introducing the campus, the dining options, and the extra care we put into our marketing efforts to enhance our customer experience.”

She cites numbers that show the concept’s success…

“We know that visits to our proprietary and retail locations were increased from the first day of school in 2022 because from the first day of school locations had sales numbers to report where they did not in the past,” Wells notes. “By having the game on day one, unlike before Dinopoly, now they find more options, faster! And that is value! It is good for them, and good for client as we are increasing the satisfaction of our customers, the students.”

The game’s success was also measured by the returns of the maps and social media response. The first winners came in within hours on the first day of school, and within two weeks, “we had a flood of maps turned in,” Wells says.

“When the first student came in 90 minutes after the meal plan office opened, we were astounded that a student plotted his course using an algorithm and an Excel spreadsheet of locations and times, got on a VEO scooter, and visited every location in record time and collected a grand prize. We hired him in our IT department directly.”