Inspiring, Entertaining, Engaging: The Cambridge Festival 2023

The Cambridge Festival 2023 ran from 17 March to 2 April and engaged with the public through a mixture of in-person and online events, covering all aspects of the world-leading research happening at Cambridge.

The Festival delivered a large number of in - person events across Cambridge. This was the first time since 2019 that the Public Engagement team have been able to deliver and facilitate in-person engagement at this level.

These ranged from dedicated open days at the University’s West Cambridge Campus, a Family Weekend at the New Museums Site, an open day at The Cambridge Academy of Science and Technology, Schools day for KS2 & KS3 learners, to all ages evening talks, walks and exhibitions. 

This included specific engagement aimed at younger people and families. Our first-ever formal school days took place on 21 and 22 March.  These events were attended by over 1400 school students from across the region, including Luton, Lincoln, Peterborough and Ipswich – alongside local Cambridge schools. The experience of 460 school kids in the Babbage lecture theatre chanting numbers is one many of us will long remember!

Our Family weekend across central Cambridge took place on 25 and 26 March 2023. This included talks and family activity at the New Museums Site. Over 7000 engagement interactions took place across these two days, with incredibly positive feedback from researchers and organisations participating, including: 

‘’Amazing Day - Thank you! My kids and I had a great day. Everything was really well organized and the facilitators pitched their interactions just right (top marks for knowledge transfer!)”

The Festival’s YouTube Channel, alongside a playlist on the University of Cambridge's YouTube channel, hosted the video content. These Included digital online events ( Live and on-demand) alongside live streams of in person events.

Most people (70%) seem to be finding our videos through the “suggested videos” option on YouTube and 89% of viewers have been non-subscribers. Most watched video is On the Origin of Time with 6K views.

Geographical reach by watch-time ( a good comparison, as populations differ greatly between countries) shows the top three countries for digital engagement  being the United Kingdom (40%) India (4.8%) (USA 4.6%). This is broadly in-line with the previous two years of digital delivery.

Engagement across the dedicated Festival and University Social media channels enabled people to engage with research content, and acted as a promotional tool for in- person and digital events.

Across all social media channels detailed below, our reach increased by 86% on delivery in 2022, and our engagements increased this year by 68%.

The third year of the Cambridge Festival saw widespread local and regional coverage, and some national and international press coverage of the research, events and individuals featured in the Festival programme.

Including all print, broadcast and web coverage detailed below, the conservative estimate is that 8 million+ people could have read articles or watched reports and listened to radio broadcasts about the Cambridge Festival.

We carried out visitor evaluation across a number of formats. This included via an online survey sent out to those attending festival events and via direct feedback collation at events. To date, this feedback on visitor evaluation encompasses 500 distinct responses.

How did people find out about the Festival?

What would you like to see more of in 2024?

We asked Professional Staff and Researchers to provide feedback on the Festival. To date we have received 50 unique survey responses.

Key reasons given for this score are:

• The Cambridge Festival team were immensely helpful! Pretty much always prompt to reply and provided any information I needed about the venue, booking system etc.
• Everything went smoothly, the support staff on site were really helpful & I felt that my team and I had all the information/support we needed.
• You make it easy for us to take part
• Very swift and positive communications with the festival team
• It was great to interact with members of the public and talk about science, including my own research. It helped me really think about the aim and benefits that my work may have.
• We hugely enjoyed the Cambridge Festival event that we ran - we ended up running a huge waitlist, so there was clearly an appetite for the kind of thing we wanted to do and the festival helped us to reach new audiences, who hadn't heard of us before.

Partners in the Cambridge Festival include Anglia Ruskin University, The Cambridge School of Visual and Performing Arts, Cambridge Regional College, Cambridge Academy of Science and Technology and Cambridge Carbon Footprint. 

Festival events were either hosted by, or featured engagement from, over 20 of the Colleges. This included the hosting of our Vice Chancellors festival launch event at St John's College. This event was attended by the Acting Vice Chancellor Dr Antony Freeling, Daniel Zeichner, MP for Cambridge, and Aliko Ahmed, Director for Public Health East of England.

We thank everyone who contributed to the Festival this year. Thanks to the support of the University of Cambridge and the continued generosity of our sponsors, AstraZeneca and RAND Europe, we are able to ensure that the majority of events remain free.