Case Study • 2025
Museum of the American Revolution
Making historical resources more accessible through better search and improved content design.
01
The Challenge
Make it easier for the public to find and use the museum’s vast trove of Revolutionary War resources
02
The Approach
Implement Algolia for best-in-class search, and redesign the museum's lesson format to make using museum materials easier.
03
The Outcome
A search function that lets educators, students, and history enthusiasts quickly find the materials they need, while also giving museum staff more insight into what people are searching for.
Client Introduction
A Gateway to the History of the Revolutionary War
The Museum of the American Revolution brings to life the diverse people and events that shaped America’s fight for liberty, equality, and self-government. Just steps from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, it offers immersive exhibits and theater experiences that deepen visitors' understanding and inspire reflection, as well as online resources for students and educators. Since opening in 2017, this private, non-profit, and non-partisan museum has served as a gateway to the region’s Revolutionary War history.
Project at a Glance
What Our Team Provided
Solutions
- Websites
- Search & Discovery
Technologies
The Ask
Making content more accessible for everyone
The Museum of the American Revolution wanted to make its online content more accessible and easier to use. To that end, there were two components to this project: revamping the museum’s sitewide search experience to make content more accessible for everyone and creating a new template for museum-created lessons to support educators and students.
Providing better results in less time
The Museum has a large amount of online content to help people better understand the Revolutionary War. But content is only useful if you can find it when you need it, and the museum's legacy search tool—Elasticsearch—regularly returned results that were far from helpful. On top of that, making updates to refine results with their specific Elasticsearch implementation was cumbersome and more costly than search updates should be. As a result, those updates simply weren’t being made.
To remedy this, we implemented Algolia’s Search-as-a-Service platform. Not only does Algolia return relevant results much faster than the old system, the results provide more meaningful insights than before. Now, thanks to an investment in setting up Algolia analytics, museum staff can fine-tune search on the website themselves, often without needing help from developers.
UX Strategy & Design
Improving teacher resources through better design
Another aspect of this project was to improve the resources that the museum offers educators. Previously, this content took the form of lesson plans: long, text-heavy pages that made it difficult to find exactly what was needed.
To make these resources more digestible—and to ensure that museum staff could continue to update them on their own—we created a template for museum “activities.” Each component of the longer, text-heavy lesson is broken out into a stand-alone activity page, with space for images and links to provide everything needed to complete the activity. With this template, staff can easily reorganize existing content and build new content while maintaining consistency.
On top of that, the activities were designed to be 508 compliant, meeting government standards for accessibility and ensuring that everyone can use the museum’s resources.
Analytics and Advanced Features
Unlocking insights and features with Algolia Analytics
Beyond improving the frontend search experience, we delivered a strategic Algolia analytics integration to give museum staff actionable insights with real user data. This allows their marketing team to fine-tune results, observe topics of interests and trends, and identify opportunities to promote content that users might not know about.
Our search implementation also included taking advantage of some of Aloglia’s more advanced features. One is federated search, which allows users to search multiple data sources at once. Now, when users search the website, they’re automatically presented with top recent searches, as well as curated content from MOAR. This includes surfacing information about upcoming live events, rather than events that have already happened, something that the previous search engine had trouble doing.
Ongoing Support
We’re here for the long haul
The recent project to implement Algolia and revamp the museum’s online activities is just the latest in our ongoing partnership. As with many of our clients, we’ve cultivated a long-term relationship with the Museum of the American Revolution that goes beyond providing top-notch implementation. We’re also able to provide tech guidance–as well as UX/UI design–to help the museum navigate the ever-changing digital landscape, helping the museum to make sound investments for the future.
The End Result
Telling the story of the American Revolution
The difference between the museum’s old search functionality and the new Algolia-based solution we’ve implemented is night and day. Now, students, educators, and history buffs alike can find the exact resource they're looking for on the museum’s website as fast as they can type.
With a vastly superior search tool and streamlined, easy-to-digest online activities, the museum can continue its mission of telling the rich and complex story of our nation’s founding.
Client Testimonials
"I appreciate how Foster Made always looks out for our best interests, thinking about the long-term impact of our investments in new technology. We want to use our dollars in the best way possible, and they help us do that."
