[2] By adopting a crowdfunding and crowdsourcing approach,[3] DigVentures have sought to address this by using digital and social media to build audiences, increase revenue and find new ways for the public to participate in archaeological fieldwork.

[8] It was built onto a cloud-based, open-source software platform enabling researchers to publish data directly from the field using any web-enabled device (such as a smartphone or tablet) into a live relational database.

[11][12][13] The site had experienced a 50% decline in visitors since the large-scale English Heritage-funded excavations finished in 1995; the project's remit was to help revitalise the heritage attraction, whilst providing detailed scientific information on the preservation of the waterlogged timbers.

Francis Pryor, who discovered the site in the 1970s, was supportive of the initiative and wrote afterwards: "happily, it was an experiment that worked: the participants had a good time, and the archaeology was professionally excavated, to a very high standard".

The group also found evidence of an early medieval building, "which seems to have been constructed on top of an even earlier industrial oven" which was used to make copper or glass.

[citation needed] Recent excavations led by DigVentures in 2019–20 in the castle's drawbridge pit uncovered numerous mason's marks on the structure, as well as lead shot dating to the Civil War.

[24][25] Mentioned in the Norman Domesday Book, Soulton has housed a manor since late Anglo Saxon times, and a "lost castle" rediscovered in 2021[26] undergoing a multi-season archaeological investigation by DigVentures.

[29][30] Two additional crowdfunded field seasons were led by DigVentures to salvage as much archaeological evidence as possible from the narrowing isthmus under active threat of collapse from coastal erosion.