Maintain your connections during these times of physical distancing
During the spread of COVID-19 and these unprecedented times of restaurant closures, mandatory remote work, and limits on social gatherings, many are looking for ways to not only continue supporting their business but also maintain their social connections. Traditional trivia nights in these conditions are being put on hiatus in conjunction with these areas of social gatherings being shut.
While this is happening, virtual trivia nights are a great way to stay connected with patrons and also maintain social connections with work colleagues and friends.
Read on to learn how you can start one of your own now.
GET THE RIGHT TOOLS
Without being in-person, you’ll need to use some different tools to ensure you can recreate the trivia night experience. We’ve outlined some options for you below.
Video Conferencing
The first tool you’ll need is a video conferencing tool. This will allow you to broadcast yourself hosting, as well as see and interact with the participants. There are several options here and we’ll outline our favorites.
Zoom - Zoom is great for events where everyone knows each other as everyone can share their screen and participate. We recommend this for virtual business happy hours as your company likely already has a subscription to support large gatherings. Zoom also includes the ability to automatically create teams and give them break-out rooms to discuss question answers.
Google Hangouts - This is a great free option that is similar to Zoom.
Facebook Live - This is a good option if you are hosting an event where most of the people may not know each other. Others don’t share their screen and only you are presented so it creates more of a one-way hosting experience.
Trivia Software
While you can host your trivia night without a trivia software, using TriviaHub Live will not only provide the great trivia questions you need, but will also help streamline the hosting. Some of the key benefits include:
Team manager - your players will be able to self form into teams and work together on answers
Question presenter - you can present questions and track round progress
Answer submission - you can gather team answers directly online
Online scoreboard - you can calculate team scores automatically and track leaders
PREPARE FOR YOUR EVENT
After you’ve found your tools of choice, you’ll want to make sure you prep for your event.
Scheduling the event
The first thing you’ll need to do is choose a date and time for your event. We recommend you try to keep a social cadence you had before any shutdowns. So, if you are hosting something for your office co-workers, a Thursday night virtual happy hour makes a perfect time. If you are a bar, keeping the in-person trivia time you had established makes sense as well. Typically that would be a slower weeknight at around 7:00 PM.
We recommend these virtual events target 90-minutes, but try it out and ask your audience what their preference is.
Get the word out
You’ll want to make sure you get the word out for your event, especially if you are a bar taking your event online. Patrons will need to know you are still excited to connect with them and provide time to socialize over some fun trivia and prizes.
Using your social media channels like Facebook and Twitter to post about your event typically works best. Make sure you let them know they can still win some great e-prizes!
Choosing your prize
You’ll want to make sure you have a prize ready for the winning team. For a virtual event it’s important that you choose a prize that can be delivered electronically. e-Gift cards seem to work best and you may want to get creative with services that are open during times of closure, like GrubHub, Kroger, Amazon, or others.
You may also want to ask your local businesses that may be impacted to sponsor the event and get a gift card out for their establishment to be used once the lockdown has been lifted. This can be a great way to keep their brands top-of-mind for customers.
TEST YOUR TOOLS
Make sure you take some time to do a trial run with your new video conferencing and trivia tools so that you feel ready for your event. You’ll want to ensure your webcam and microphone are working and that you feel comfortable using the tools if your players have questions. Doing a trial run with a fellow colleague works great.
DEFINING TEAMS
If you are hosting an event where you know who will be playing, you can send an invite out using your video conferencing tool and pre-group the invitees into teams. This will help streamline play when your event starts. This is an optional step as you can also let players play individually or group them into teams once the event starts.
HOST YOUR EVENT
When the time arrives and it is time to host your event, some things will be different than hosting in-person. We’ll outline steps to follow for your virtual trivia event below so you can feel assured you’ll have a successful time.
Getting started
As your event gets started and players start to join your event, you’ll want to make sure that everyone can see and hear you and that the chat features are working in your video conferencing tool.
If you are using TriviaHub Live, you should post to the audience the game URL (live.triviahub.io/remote) and event code that they can type into their browsers to join the game. Once they do, they’ll also be able to create a team by selecting their team name. You’ll want to make sure that the team elects a captain who will be submitting answers for the team and only they register.
After players have joined, you’ll also want to group them into teams within your video conferencing tool. This will allow them to chat about answers with each other during game play. Your tool should allow you to define the teams or create them at random. You may choose to forego this step and just let the teams chat in a tool of their choosing outside of the hosted event (Slack, Group Text, Group FaceTime, etc.).
Starting the game
Once you are set, you’ll want to start as you normally would and welcome everyone to the trivia night and only start to read questions after everyone is paying attention. Your video conferencing tools allow you to mute all players if things are a bit too rowdy to start.
You’ll want to make sure to remind people that as this is a virtual event, they are on the honor system and should not be looking up answers or cheating.
Presenting the questions
Once you’ve launched the game, make sure to read your questions at a steady pace, and in a clear, direct voice. Make sure to read each question twice incase a player didn’t hear the first time. Each question should take about 1 minute to complete.
If using TriviaHub Live, you’ll also be able to present the question on your shared screen and start a timer to keep the game on track. Your players will also have their own web portal to submit their answers for each question as well.
ENDING THE ROUND
After you’ve gotten through all questions in the round, you will end the round. Instruct your players to make sure they have submitted their answers in their web portal and then you can use the auto-scoring feature to calculate all scores.
Some will use this time to take a drink/restroom break. If so, at the end of break, announce and display the correct answers, present the current leaderboard and read off the team names and their total scores.
Finishing the game
After your final round, you can announce the final results and the winner of the game. Complete a tie-breaker round if required and then award your prizes!
Thank everyone for coming and remind them when the next trivia event will be. And that’s it, you did it!
We hope this information has been helpful in starting your own virtual trivia night! If you are in need of any other trivia night help, we are here for you. TriviaHub’s turn-key solution includes everything you need to put a trivia event on for your team today!