The UK Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) wanted more effective ways to understand attendance at un-ticketed cultural and sporting events, where surveys or manual counts often fall short. Traditional methods cannot reliably capture hyper-local participation, especially for short-duration or open-access events, limiting the ability to fully understand our cultural and sporting sectors.
To address this, DCMS commissioned Verian, working with academic partners at the University of Glasgow and data scientists at Faculty AI, to explore whether modern data sources such as mobile location data, social-media activity, activity-tracking apps, and aerial imagery could offer more accurate, scalable alternatives.
Verian combined social research, data-science expertise, and academic insight to test new methods across five contrasting real-world settings. These included the Great North Run, British Museum, Giant’s Causeway, Women’s Euros 2022 screenings and Bradford 25 UK City of Culture.
Each method was assessed for accuracy, ethics, cost, bias, feasibility and generalisability. We also produced a Methodology Toolkit to guide users in choosing and safely applying the right approach for different types of events.
The project gives DCMS a set of validated, practical methods for measuring attendance where no ticketing or formal counting infrastructure exists. While a number of these methods need further development, refinement, and tailoring, as a whole, they can support better planning, evaluation and value-for-money assessments, and depending on the approach can also offer insights such as dwell time or visitor catchment.
By combining data science with social research, DCMS now has more flexible, robust ways to understand public engagement in cultural and sporting life.