Reaching New Audiences at Non-Science Venues

Over the past several years, a team from the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN have organised outreach and education activities at a variety of non-scientific venues. These have included the Montreux Jazz Festival (Montreux, Switzerland), the Bluedot Festival (Jodrell Bank, UK), the WOMAD Festival (Charlton Park, UK), and Moogfest (Durham, NC, USA). The goal of this effort is to engage new audiences who normally would not be drawn to science festivals and to investigate our ability to communicate scientific messages to broad, diverse audiences. The results have been impressive, as measured through attendance (the first Physics Pavilion at WOMAD received 4500 visitors over 3 days and such was the success that a return invitation was received immediately for 2017 with additional space) and enthusiasm of the audience and scientists hosting the activities. I describe the presentation material and format, the hands-on workshops, and other methods employed, as well as lessons learned on how to best optimise audience engagement. These efforts can be reproduced with other experiments and the concept can be reproduced including other scientific disciplines: for example, offers to participate in 'the next event' have been received from attendees who are in the fields of meteorology and biology.