Trivia matches are an awesome social activity for friends and acquaintances to gather and compete against each other. The one who has the most trivia knowledge wins and often there is a prize involved. These events can also be a good opportunity to get to know people and are often held in a casual space such as a bar or a cafe. However, they can also be a great socializing or team building activity in the workplace, after work hours that is.
A lot of prep goes into hosting a trivia night, especially at the office. There is the timings, putting down the contestants, snacks, and most importantly the questions to be asked. You’ll need to do a fair amount of research of your own into the matter for a successful trivia night. Here are some tips to get you started.
Research good questions
Since you won’t have to worry about setting up the venue and timings for an office Trivia Night, we can get straight to the meat and potatoes. A good trivia night has good questions that are both challenging and easy enough that it isn’t unreasonable. If they are too difficult, competitors can struggle and get frustrated. And since the competitors are your workmates, you don’t want to make them angry as it can impact work relationships.
So, a good trivia night has a healthy selection of questions with varying difficulties. Mix your questions up between easy and difficult to ensure everyone has a fighting chance. That way you can strike a good balance and prevent your participants from getting bored or frustrated.
Send out fun invitations
To make your trivia night a success, you must ensure that a healthy number of people attend to participate and spectate. When no one shows up, your event ends up flopping. So you want to have a decent number of people as competitors and attendees. You can do this by getting the word out which is easy in a workplace environment. You have many notice boards and can send a company wide email to apprise people of the upcoming event and put up and send poster invitations.
To make these posters and flyers, you may use PosterMyWall’s gaming poster templates. These professionally made templates are designed to quickly give the posters and flyers you need for whatever purpose. The best part is, you don’t need any graphics designer to make these posters as you can do so yourself in minutes.
Decide good prizes
A trivia night is a competition and a good contest always has good prizes. After all, you want to give your competitors a reason to play the game. Most trivia nights have cash prizes and such which are good prizes, but may not be appropriate for a workplace. So you have to do some brainstorming and decide what to give as prizes.
Gift cards are a good idea to give out for different stores, spa treatments are a good prize, and so are tours which the company may finance. Basically anything that can give the employees a reason to compete can work here. So see what your budget is and what you can do here.
Prepare backups
Things can go wrong and sometimes do in events such as these. Maybe you find the questions you prepared aren’t as good, you may lose the document you prepared, or even the sound system can break down. So it’s best to prepare backups. Have a backup set of questions, ensure you have a back up sound system as well in case the main one breaks down.
You may even consider getting the Jackbox Party Pack which has a built in trivia in game which you can play instead. Purchase the game and install it on a laptop. It is fairly light weight so most systems can handle it. Contestants can sign in using their phones and answer there and the game does the rest. The best part is that the audience can vote as well making them involved in the process.
Conclusion
The most important tip we can share is to have fun. If you’re miserable, then your mood and energy can affect the players and spectators. So ensure that you’re having fun at the event. Be involved at the trivia night, prepare snacks, and engage everyone so they feel included and valued. The goal is to have a fun and casual activity at the office, so try to forget about the work stress, about quotas, reports and what not and just have fun.