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  • 1.  Tracking School Tours

    Posted 12-08-2023 01:24 PM

    When school tours are booked are my organization, we send an Outlook calendar invite to staff with the tour information. For end-of-the-year numbers to see how many tours and students have visited, does anyone have a good way to track those numbers? Is it as simple as creating an Excel document and updating the information? I'm also trying to consolidate the information so have the teacher's contact information in the tracking as well. If anyone has any suggestions or specific things they use, please let me know! Thanks!



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    Kaitlynn Anderson
    Curator
    Latah County Historical Society
    Moscow ID
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  • 2.  RE: Tracking School Tours

    Posted 12-14-2023 12:28 PM

    We just use a spreadsheet.  It's not great, but for us, it's easiest/cheapest. 



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    Heather Pressman
    Director of Learning & Engagement
    Molly Brown House Museum
    Denver CO

    Co-author of The Art of Access: A Practical Guide for Museum Accessibility.
    Use the code RLFANDF30 at rowman.com for 30% off!
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Tracking School Tours

    Posted 12-15-2023 09:09 AM

    We use our Outlook calendar to post the school booking form for Guest Services. We use an Excel sheet to capture details. We document the program date, time, program name, grade level, school name, address, school contact, email, phone, county, city, state, number of students and number of teachers and chaperones.  



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    Patty Petrey Dees
    Director of Education
    Booth Western Art Museum
    Cartersville GA

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    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Tracking School Tours

    Posted 12-15-2023 09:19 AM

    We also use Excel to document the program date, time, program name, grade level, school category for easy sorting (local public, local non-public, non-local, and college/university), school name, address, school contact, email, phone, county, city, state, number of students and number of teachers and chaperones. All of this helps us report data for our annual report and grants. 



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    Elisabeth Palmer
    Assistant Curator of Education, Docent and Adult Programs
    Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts
    Montgomery AL
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    Original Message


  • 5.  RE: Tracking School Tours

    Posted 12-15-2023 10:03 AM

    We receive tour requests through Google Forms so the contact information and additional details are then immediately added to a Google Sheet. And we connect this Sheet to our Google Calendar which can then send the calendar invite to staff member's Outlook calendar. It's a complicated and, at time, tedious process, but it works well enough for us! 



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    Tyler Osborne
    Digital Learning Manager
    Maryland Center for History and Culture
    Baltimore MD
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    Original Message


  • 6.  RE: Tracking School Tours

    Posted 12-15-2023 12:20 PM

    The Computer History Museum has been using AirTable for all kinds of tracking and program planning purposes. It works generally like Excel but has much more functionality for consolidating, sorting, and reporting information. And because it is online it is easy to share with all stakeholders and contributors. I haven't seen it used for this particular purpose but it might be worth looking into.



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    Kristin Morris
    Cisco Archivist
    Computer History Museum
    Mountain View CA
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    Original Message


  • 7.  RE: Tracking School Tours

    Posted 12-18-2023 11:27 AM

    Hi All, 

    It sounds like we use a similar spreadsheet tracking system but without any auto-populating calendar invites. Whenever a school or organization requests to schedule a program (via a form on our website, call or email) we add their details into a planning spreadsheet. As we get more information we update this spreadsheet and use it to keep all of our ducks in a row. Once the program happens we finalize the data (how many students/chaperones came vs. how many were estimated) and then copy and paste the row into a final tracking spreadsheet. The planning spreadsheet is on Google Drive so we can access it anywhere easily, and the spreadsheet we use for tracking and reporting is in Excel on our server. 

    Columns we use include: Type of program (virtual, traveling, on site), date, time, program title (content), grade, school/org name, group type (school, homeschool coop, org etc), leader/teacher name email and phone, # students, # adults, # classes, # programs (sometimes 3 classes come for 2 programs), volunteer info, city, state, county the group is coming from, scholarship info, title 1 status, invoice status, and then columns to track what pre-visit resources have been sent or need to be sent.

    Hope this is helpful, good luck! 

    Carolyn Taber, Missoula Butterfly House & Insectarium 



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    Carolyn Taber
    Museum Educator
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    Original Message


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