The Covid pandemic fundamentally changed the ways many of us delivered Public Engagement activity, pivoting from almost entirely in-person events to, through necessity, working in the digital space. One of the huge positives of this rather strange time was how the Public Engagement and festival sectors came together to share expertise and experience. Many of us have learnt huge amounts about engaging online from these conversations. But we have missed sharing spaces with people. There is a real desire among our researchers and many of our local communities to return to in-person events.
This post forms part of a larger series of blogs that representatives of the LERU focus group on Public Engagement are writing to inspire and inform academics, societal partners and citizens who have a keen interest in Public Engagement. In this post, Dr Lucinda Spokes, Head of Public Engagement and David Cain, Cambridge Festival Manager, discuss some central tensions between online, hybrid and in-person events, and who we exclude when making the choice of engagement format. They are both part of the central Public Engagement team at the University of Cambridge in the UK. They focus on learnings from the Cambridge Festival, and the wider implications for engagement planning, in order to challenge us all to think more deeply about equitable inclusive engagement.


Why Public Engagement?
We like Public Engagement because it brings people together.
We like Public Engagement even better when it results in conversations that bring together diverse groups of people with different views, experiences and beliefs.
We want our activities to excite and interest and challenge how we all think.
We need our activities to be inclusive and equitable spaces for these conversations to happen.
We love Public Engagement when these conversations lead to positive societal change.

The mission of the University of Cambridge is to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. Public Engagement in its broadest sense fulfils the University’s mission by creating bridges between the academic community and the public, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. The University defines Public Engagement as the many ways in which we share expertise, knowledge gained, resources and collections to both inform and inspire those we interact with, whilst creating opportunities for experts beyond academia to collaborate on research.
Before the Covid pandemic we consciously chose to use different engagement formats – talks, focus groups, workshops and more – and physical places to run events in. We used our own university venues but also city spaces so that we could have conversations with people who were more representative of our community as a whole.
Come Covid, we knew we needed to move events online. Even if our skills were limited, the technology was there and much of our focus was finding ways to continue to include those without reliable internet access while we waited for the world to go back to ‘normal’.
At this point we were looking at who we were excluding when we engaged online, focusing on the digital divide, not who we had excluded in the past by only running in-person events. Inequities in society were laid bare and it brought home rather bluntly that whatever we do, we are making decisions that exclude people.
And whilst we don’t expect everyone to come to the Cambridge Festival or take part in our projects, it is our responsibility as a privileged institution to reduce the barriers to engagement, so that those that wish to engage with us, are able to do so.
Online Delivery and Public Engagement
Feedback from online events honestly surprised us, we expected lots of ‘this was the best of a bad situation’. But evaluation shows that people have really valued the accessibility of online festival events, particularly those with disabilities and caring and work responsibilities, and those who do not live locally. The use of interactive online tools was effective too, with many more comments and questions than we expected from our in-person experiences. As a result, we will continue to deliver online events for both our local and international audiences alongside in-person events and use digital tools in both.
And although we are now converts to the value of online events, evaluation of these really only looks at reach. How do we move beyond viewer numbers? What would significant / in depth engagement look like online and how might we measure it effectively? This is also a key question for everyone using digital platforms for engagement. Moreover, the platforms that we use are designed to deliver quantitative results – viewer numbers and times, and impressions and engagement responses such as clicks, likes and comments. Is this, though, so different to a room full of people where we know the attendance, but not necessarily for how long a person has actively engaged with the content, or their experience as an individual? A degree of independent evaluation through interviews, surveys and observation will always be needed for both.
Is Hybrid the Answer to Fully Accessible Events?
Technological advances mean hybrid is possible and having speakers from across the world joining an in-person event works well. However, running a festival event with both an in-person and an online audience is still problematic, as we know the audience experience is very different. Additionally, most of us work in tiny teams with big ambitions but small budgets and a hybrid event effectively requires us to run two event formats simultaneously. We have to prioritise where we use our resources.
But importantly, trying to fit everything into a hybrid event risks losing what makes each format special. We’d suggest a greater diversity of events and a greater diversity of platforms for engaging could be the best way to make our engagement more accessible. Even if this brings more questions around capacity and delivery.
What next?
The great thing about the Cambridge Festival is it always feels like this experiment which takes place once a year. We’re in a fortunate position, we can continue experiment and we can try things out, evaluate and change what we do each year.
We’re focusing on how we develop a festival with a ‘chosen inclusion’ EDI focus. One which enables people to participate, or not. One that respects choice and advocacy by providing the conditions for participation, not segregation. We’re not there yet. Digital engagement is one tool in the Public Engagement tool kit that supports this change but we need also to better understand the changing event landscape post Covid. We need to do this through conversations, evaluation and collaboration with our communities, our researchers, EDI experts and our festival and engagement peers and with colleagues in the cultural sector, both locally and internationally.
The Public Engagement Team at the University of Cambridge provides advice and an extensive training portfolio to build researcher skills and confidence, funding schemes to facilitate projects and opportunities and platforms, including the Cambridge Festival, for researchers and members of the public to engage, interact and learn from each other.

We provide bespoke advice and support to enable researchers and Public Engagement professionals to lead their own Public Engagement projects and to help embed a culture of engagement across the University. We believe that this engaged research practice improves research outcomes, broadens researcher perspectives and enhances the University’s impact on, and contribution to, society.
We want to continue this discussion. Please get in touch and share your thoughts and your practice so that we can keep learning together and develop better Public Engagement activity online and in-person that has inclusion at its centre.
Dr Lucinda Spokes
Head of Public Engagement
University of Cambridge
Lucinda.Spokes@admin.cam.ac.uk
@CamUniEngage
David Cain
Cambridge Festival Manager
University of Cambridge
David.Cain@admin.cam.ac.uk
@Cambridge_Fest
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
lucindaspokes (January 31, 2025). In-Person, Online, Hybrid Events: Who are we choosing to exclude? LERU Public Engagement Scholarly Blog. Retrieved May 14, 2026 from https://lerupesb.hypotheses.org/83