The Galt Museum & Archives typically takes over 12,000 students, teachers and adult chaperones through school programs each year. Arranging dates and times for the hundreds of school classes has been a time-consuming task for museum educators in the past. One of the projects that the Galt has been focused on has been how to streamline the education booking process to simplify and automate as many steps as possible.

In January 2020, Marketing Officer Graham Ruttan and Museum Educator Rebecca Wilde launched a new online booking system that completed that booking automation project. “The booking process was lengthy and consumed quite a bit of time for teachers at schools as well as for staff here at the museum,” says Wilde. “This system has greatly simplified the process, with teachers booking programs, getting notifications and reminders, as well as follow up emails, all without us having to do anything!”

MuseWeb (formerly Museums and the Web) is an international professional organization with participating institutions around the world. According to their website, the GLAMi awards “showcase the best work the field does to engage, inform and excite people both on the Web and across the myriad networked platforms and contexts innovative cultural practices take us.” The awards are open to submissions from any gallery, library, archive or museum. The Galt Museum & Archives was awarded top place in the “Behind the Scenes” category for the new online booking program.

“[The] Galt did a great job doing what many other institutions (many much larger) have not achieved… creating a system to actually give teachers a way to self-book their group visits to the museum,” said the award judges. “Rather than the usual back-and-forth, they truly automated the process, keeping ease of use for the teacher at the core.”

Teachers began using the site immediately and found the changes helpful and easy to use. “It was extremely easy and very, very convenient,” said a local teacher. “I found it to be super easy to navigate, and having the dates and times available in real time was so much appreciated, as opposed to booking dates and waiting for confirmation on their availability.”

“It took us about a week to set the system up, test it and launch it,” says Ruttan. “We had done a lot of work over the previous year with Museum Educator Ashley Henrickson to thoroughly study the booking process, so when we were ready to set up the full automation system things progressed very quickly.”

“We are extremely pleased with the recognition of this project as outstanding in our field,” says Susan Burrows-Johnson, CEO/Executive Director. “This particular system has greatly simplified an ongoing task that many museums and cultural institutions face, and it is easily implemented by an institution of any size. It has let our educator focus more time and effort creating and preparing engaging educational experiences for students.”

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This media release can be found at www.galtmuseum.com/news.

Media Contact:

Graham Ruttan (he/him)
Marketing and Communications Officer
Galt Museum & Archives | Fort Whoop-Up
graham.ruttan@galtmuseum.com
403.320.4009