Jo Gillam: Accessing heritage & engaging with new audiences

Museums, galleries and historic sites want learners to have the best learning experiences with them. A lot of effort is rightly put into session content and resources. Learners can benefit more from these if there’s good planning. Here, I’ll be sharing my experience of helping learners and those bringing them, to prepare for their visits. Encourage pre-visits Research has shown that pre-visits can make a big, positive difference to the outcomes of museum-led sessions. The booking form can be a good place for customers to book or register an interest in one. Pre-visits enable customers to familiarise themselves with the route to and around the parts of the museum they’ll be returning to. They can use this to write risk assessments and to prepare for the sensory experiences of the learning visit. It helps with those potentially troublesome, time-consuming details such as how they manage children’s visits to the shop or to the drinking fountain. Assist by flagging-up any changes si

Museums, galleries and historic sites offer fantastic resources for learning outside the classroom. They and their customers want learners to have superb learning experiences so it pays to get the basics right from the start. I’m taking a look at some of the best ways to help learners gain the most from in-house led sessions before they arrive. This time, I’m considering the booking process. It may not be ‘sexy’ but it provides the basis for any new relationship once you and the customer have made contact. Keep it simple Some sites send paper forms and ask for them to be posted back. If you can’t avoid this, I recommend that you always post to an up-to-date named contact (this applies to any method of correspondence) and provide an SAE. It should be possible for people to make enquiries by other means, but not to leave messages on the assumption that by stating their preferred session and time, both have been secured for them. Of course, if you’re lucky enough to be able to o