Delivering content online about archaeological innovation
Our Innovation Festival has played an active role in our annual event calendar since its inception in 2021. While the content of the festival has been excellent year after year, audience engagement has not grown to best serve the wider membership. With the aim to improve member engagement, we have taken audience feedback to inform how to change the festival.
The Innovation Insights programme will feature the same accessible, high calibre CPD you loved in Innovation Festival, with a similarly affordable price point. Innovation Insights will be scattered throughout the year, while keeping the exclusively digital format. This will allow our members with stricter schedules a bit more flexibility to engage with as many sessions as they can, rather than needing to book a week out.
Innovation Insights will keep what works about Innovation Festival, while making it more accessible to a wider cohort of archaeologists. By breaking up the festival into standalone sessions, we will be able to better support each session, ensuring that members don’t miss out on the individual sessions that most interest them.
Call for content
Our Innovation Insight programme will feature innovative content driven by members and registered organisations. Does your work implement innovative techniques or methods of practice? Have you created a new framework to put existing tools to better use? Do you have some ideas for a wider discussion of innovation in archaeology? We’d love to hear from you! Please submit your proposal using the below Microsoft Form.
Session proposals 2026-2027 – Fill out form
Overview of Innovation Festival
Over the past 5 years, CIfA has hosted the Innovation Festival as part of our portfolio of annual events. It was the result of a project exploring barriers to innovation in develop-led archaeology.
The first Innovation Festival was held in January 2021 and was CIfA’s return to high calibre programming amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The event was free, with an estimated 16.5 hours of content, drawing around 480 individual attendees.
Since then, we have continued to host the event, wishing to engage with our membership at an affordable price point, featuring some of the most innovative work we have at our disposal. Over the past five years, we have hosted six festivals, engaged with over 650 attendees, and awarded nearly 140 free places to speakers or bursary recipients.
Highlights
Highlights of the festival year after year are the quality of content and speakers, affordability, accessibility and flexibility. Festival participants consistently provide glowing feedback about the content being high calibre, centring speakers who might not otherwise attend our annual conference. The festival was designed to engage widely across different audiences and provided a platform for a range of contributions ranging from students speakers to technical experts. The festival was regarded as being good value for money. Between the digital presentations and recording access, Innovation Festival provided some of the best flexibility for engagement. Members living in less accessible regions or those with concerns about going far from their homes can engage with a challenging programme of content.
Room for growth
In spite of these successes for Innovation Festival, there also continue to be challenges in the execution of the event. The week-long format is regularly critiqued, citing that taking a full week away form work or studies is not realistic. The proximity of the festival to the summer holidays proves a challenge when it comes to speaker organisation. In a time when the Institute is focusing on our entire offering to the membership, it is an event that is incredibly time consuming for staff, while having a relatively low level of engagement with the membership (approx. 3% of register for any individual festival).
Looking forward
Do not fret! We are not getting rid of Innovation Festival or planning to gut the system. We are looking at what the strengths are, how we can best support it, and bring in better engagement overall.