Nancy Heltman

I'm the Visitor Services Director for Virginia State Parks and am responsible for managing the section that includes marketing, our volunteer program, nature and cultural programming (we call that Visitor Experience) as well as customer service and our Customer Service Center. I am also the State Parks technology liaison in our agency, the Department of Conservation and Recreation. Part of my specific customer service duties involve managing our Your Comments Count surveys and responding to questions and complaints. 

I actually started working for State Parks on May 1, 1996 as the Manager for the Customer Service Center, then called the Reservation Center. I have visited all of our parks multiple times and am very familiar with all of our facilities and park features. I can remember when our website had very little information and believe it or not we used to have the symbol ~ in our website address. Can you imagine trying to tell someone over the phone a url with a tilde in it? I worked with our Public Communication Office to improve the information on our website and we still continue to find new ways to provide what our visitors need to know before they arrive.

I manage our social media efforts. I am part of a three person team that manages our Facebook page and I manage our presence on all the other social media sites as well. We started using social media sites at the end of 2008. When I worked in the Customer Service Center I had a lot of contact with our customers and I missed that as I moved to a position with less direct contact. Social media gives me a way to relate to our customers on a deeper level and I enjoy that. 

On the home front, my husband David and I live in Sandston with two dogs and four cats. Nearly all of our vacations are in State Parks. My favorite activity is relaxing on a bench overlooking beautiful scenery. While I know many of our customers like cell service and wifi, I prefer vacationing in our parks without Verizon cell service. I am a bit of a workaholic and you can find me replying to email and on social media sites into the evening and on weekends so for a real vacation, I need to be forcibly unplugged.