Attendance and engagement at UK sporting, cultural and heritage sites
Attendance and engagement at UK sporting, cultural and heritage sites supports researchers to measure unticketed attendance and participation, developing practical tools to strengthen DCMS’s evidence base.
Funder: UK Research and Innovation
Due Dates: December 1, 2026, 4:00pm UK time (Full application) | May 1, 2027 (Project start) | March 31, 2030 (Completion)
Funding Amounts: Up to £1.32 million full economic cost, funded at 80%, for up to 34 months
Summary: Supports data-intensive research and deployable tools to measure attendance and participation at unticketed UK cultural, heritage and sporting activities.
Key Information: Applicants must be based at a UK research organisation eligible for AHRC funding.
Description
This UKRI opportunity is led by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), in partnership with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). It supports interdisciplinary, mixed-methods research into measuring engagement at unticketed events, activities and locations, where surveys and entry counts provide limited evidence.
Building on an earlier pilot, projects should extend models to more settings, capture participation alongside attendance, and explore whether more sophisticated machine learning improves accuracy. Engagement includes what people do, how long they stay and demographic differences. The central outcome is an operational tool deployed in at least one DCMS sector, usable and maintainable without significant specialist support. Sector partners should help shape practical findings and tools from the outset, strengthening DCMS’s evidence base.
