Interesting, inspiring and informative: The Cambridge Festival 2024

The Cambridge Festival 2024 ran from 13 March to 28 March 2024, with several pre-festival events also taking place in early March. It attracted a wide audience of all ages from the local area and beyond, including international visitors and viewers. 

The festival delivered over 270 in - person events across Cambridge. These ranged from dedicated open days at the University's West Cambridge Campus, a Family Weekend at the New Museums Site and King’s College Lawns, a Biomedical Campus Open Day at The Cambridge Academy of Science and Technology, Museum specific events, Schools Day for KS2 & KS3 learners at West Cambridge Campus, to evening talks, walks, performances, and exhibitions.   

We delivered an expanded second year of formal school days. These events took place at West Cambridge for the first time. Talks were held in the University Sports Centre and hands on workshops at West Hub, and West Cambridge departments (including the School of Veterinary medicine) were attended by over 1000 school students from across the region, alongside local Cambridge schools. This year saw an increase in home education students attending. 

- Booking numbers were high. Two main talks on the KS2 day were fully booked.
- Feedback from schools and home educators was extremely positive.
- 86.5% of Teacher's felt the content was relevant to their students learning.
- 91% stated they and their students felt comfortable at the event.
- 84.5% stated their students learnt something new.
- 93% would bring their school to something like this again.  

Our big Family weekend took place at venues across central Cambridge. This included talks and a variety of hands-on family activities at the New Museums Site and King’s College (The canImaginarium), alongside events at the Department of Engineering, Pathology, and University Museums. A minimum of 10,000 engagement interactions took place across the two days, with incredibly positive feedback from researchers and organisations participating. 

YouTube (Watch it) 

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.  

The engagement figure to date (/4/24) is over 28,000 views (this is across 14 events- with a current average view of 2,000 per event). This will continue to rise with on- demand engagement. (2023 figures reached a final - e.g. 12 month- view figure of 50,000 across 20 events with an average view of 2,500 per event). 

Podcasts (Hear it) 

The festival expanded the Festival of Podcasts which was launched last year. This brought together (for the very first time) the University of Cambridge’s podcasts in one place. This is intended as a legacy engagement- and will enable this platform to develop and grow over time. Currently there are 45 unique podcasts available via the platform, an increase of thirteen since 2023.   

The festival’s own podcast, Say That Again Slowly, a student lead podcasts series focusing on topics cand speakers from the festival, returned for a second series. 6 episodes have currently aired but the series is already approaching 1200 listens across varied platforms 

Website (Read it) 

Forty– two online articles featured across the University of Cambridge and Festival websites. These shared research content in feature article format and enabled people to explore topics in more depth. To date (4/24) there has been 10,000 story reads on the website of these featured articles.

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.

The fourth 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 6m+ people could have read articles or watched reports and listened to radio broadcasts about the Cambridge Festival.   

Approximately 70+ articles about Festival events and speakers appeared in print/ online outlets, chiefly newspapers with the bulk being local and regional newspapers. Nationally, there were stories in The Guardian, The Observer, Daily Mail and The Telegraph. There was also some international coverage including in The New York Post.   

As well as written coverage, there were approximately 33 radio interviews and TV packages about Festival events. Coverage was regional and local. Regional TV coverage included packages on BBC Look East and ITV Anglia. 

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.

Write three words to describe your experience at the festival

What would you like to see more of in 2024?

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.

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.