Enhancing Science Engagement: A Digital Platform for Kutatók Éjszakája (Researchers' Night)

The Researchers' Night Foundation's mission is to popularise science and research careers through a series of free events, Kutatók Éjszakája, that include entertaining and inspiring lectures, experiments, lab tours, and playful programmes, introducing all age groups to the latest scientific findings. To run this at national scale, they needed a digital backbone that could manage an extensive, two-day event series hosted by hundreds of organisations and featuring thousands of individual events.

The web application had to let end users discover, track, register for, and follow the events that interested them, while giving organisers a clean way to communicate with their participants. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the platform had to pivot at short notice to support full online streaming, then handle hybrid formats in 2021 and 2022 as in-person events returned alongside digital ones. The key engineering challenges were a flexible, scalable architecture that could cope with very uneven load profiles, plus search and filter functionality rich enough to help users navigate thousands of events without getting lost.

We delivered the platform with a dedicated team of a project manager, a UX/UI designer, a senior backend developer, a junior full-stack developer, a senior frontend developer, and a DevOps engineer. This mix gave us end-to-end coverage: strong UX for a broad, general-public audience, solid backend and data design for the event catalogue, and the operational rigour needed to keep the site fast and reliable around the event itself.

Technically, the main web application is built on Laravel with a Vue.js frontend, providing a robust, scalable foundation for the event catalogue, registrations, and organiser tooling. The public-facing landing site is powered by WordPress, giving the Foundation's content team full editorial control over campaign pages. The platform runs in a scalable cloud environment so it can handle large swings in load — very quiet for most of the year, then enormous spikes during the event itself — without manual intervention.

We paid particular attention to search and filters, so that visitors can navigate thousands of events by topic, location, audience age, organisation, or format, and find what interests them in seconds. Organisers were given the tools to manage their events and communicate with registered participants seamlessly from a single dashboard. When COVID-19 hit, we adapted the platform to support online streaming in 2020 and hybrid formats in 2021–2022, adding new session types and flows without disrupting the core event model.

The platform now reliably supports the annual Kutatók Éjszakája event series, attracting an average of around 100,000 unique visitors per day during the event itself. It handles registrations for roughly 800 event-organising users and around 22,000 registered participants, a scale that showcases the robustness and scalability of the underlying architecture, and the quality of the search and filtering experience.

The addition of online streaming and hybrid formats has further expanded the platform's reach, keeping scientific events accessible even in the most challenging years. The result is a long-lived digital product that genuinely advances the Foundation's mission: making science visible, approachable, and exciting for audiences right across Hungary.