Attendance and engagement at UK sporting, cultural and heritage sites

Open UKRI funding opportunity · Grant. Closes 2026-12-01. Total fund £1.32 million. Opportunity page: https://www.ukri.org/opportunity/attendance-and-engagement-at-uk-sporting-cultural-and-heritage-sites/

Apply for funding to research the development of novel data-intensive approaches for capturing engagement data from unticketed cultural, heritage, and sporting events, activities and locations, demonstrated through a deployable tool in at least one Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) sector.

You must be based at a UK research organisation eligible for AHRC funding.

The full economic cost (FEC) of your project can be up to £1.32 million. AHRC will fund 80% of the FEC.

Projects will be funded up to a maximum of 34 months and must start on 1 May 2027 and must be completed by 31 March 2030.

What we're looking for Aim

The DCMS is interested in new methods to measure both event participation and attendance, to improve the understanding of engagement across its sectors (such as sports, culture and heritage, and tourism). We take attendance to be the number of people that attend a location, event or activity. We take participation to be what people do in that location/event/activity, including an understanding of their demographics. We define engagement as a function of attendance and participation.

The challenge comes from activities outside the home, which can be unticketed, where engagement does not require a point of entry that can be measured, or where measurements need to be supplemented with additional data (for example, duration and frequency of visit) to provide useful insights. In many cases, data and insights are collected through surveys, which can be expensive and suffer from low sample sizes and recall bias, and which provide limited understanding of engagement at a local level.

To help address these limitations, the DCMS Research and Development Science and Analysis Programme published new research in March 2026 on Capturing…