When my boss decided that our team needed a few virtual socials to keep up momentum over the Winter months, I volunteered to be Social Sec. I didn't properly think through what that would require from me at the time, but decided I was up to the challenge.
I'd already had a couple of virtual socials with previous teams, including a virtual escape room (click here to read more about that), a Christmas pub quiz, and an 'Around the World Challenge' with Wildgoose, all of which were very enjoyable. The only issue was that two of the three were paid for and I thought it would be best to start with a free activity, so I settled on a quiz.
Over the Christmas holidays I put together a few rounds: the first round was General Knowledge, the second was a Dingbats round with the theme of London Tube Stations (since our office is based in London), and the third round was based on the country in which our client is based. There was also a short fourth round based on guessing who on the team the 'fun fact' (which I'd asked some people for beforehand) belonged to, as well as the opportunity for bonus points throughout.
Once I had the quiz itself prepared, I thought the hard part was over and put a date in the diary. I decided on a Thursday evening, as it was the usual day for work drinks and close enough to the weekend so that people could properly enjoy themselves. On the Wednesday evening I tried to figure out the logistics and after a quick google, I realised that I'd underestimated the difficulties of hosting a virtual quiz with several teams. For the Christmas quiz, the hosts used Zoom to announce the questions, whilst the different teams discussed their answers on Microsoft Teams, however this meant a lot of background noise and speaking over each other, whilst for the host it was hard to see whether people had answered the questions yet as most people couldn't have their cameras on both platforms simultaneously. Therefore, my top priority was keeping the quiz on just one platform. Since I'd sent out the invite with a Teams link and Teams had just announced breakout rooms as a feature, this ended up being the platform of choice. I also knew that I wanted there to be several teams instead of each person doing the quiz individually in order for it to be more sociable.
As I looked on google for logistics, many different suggestions were found, including reading out all ten questions at a time before putting the teams into their breakout rooms to discuss, and then bringing everyone back to go through the answers. Whilst I wanted the quiz to be interactive (as opposed to me just sending them all of the questions followed by the answers), I thought that reading out all ten questions followed by all ten answers would be repetitive and become boring. I tried creating surveys for the answers on multiple platforms, but each platform had its own drawback so I was undecided about how to obtain the answers. By Thursday morning I still hadn't figured it out the logistics but after asking a few friends and having a test run with the other grads, I had a plan.
The invite was for 6pm and after chatting casually for about 30 minutes, I started the quiz. There were 9 participants so I was conveniently able to randomly assign them into 3 rooms, and after explaining how the quiz would work I sent them straight into their rooms to have a quick chat. Each team sent me the name of their team captain, which opened a chat box for each room so I could interact with them (as the host can access each room's chat box). I had put the questions into lists beforehand and so sent each question for the first round as an announcement to all of the breakout rooms in roughly 45 second intervals. When you send an announcement in teams, it appears in the chat box and stays there so the participants can have the questions written and come back to them later. Obviously, this makes it very easy to cheat, however apart from encouraging them not to, it's hard to prevent this. After all ten questions were sent, I asked the teams to send me their answers and once all of the answers were in, I closed the breakout rooms and brought everyone back to the main room. It's important to get all of the answers in before closing the rooms as after the breakout rooms are closed, the participants can't access the chat boxes until the breakout rooms reopen. I then read out the answers using a powerpoint presentation, which allowed me to see everyone's reactions and also determine whether the announcements were too fast/slow. The general consensus was that 45 seconds was ideal, and so we went on to round two: London Tube Station- themed Dingbats.
This was a series of five dingbats and the teams would have to guess which tube stations they represented. Before putting them into their breakout rooms, I gave them an example of a dingbat using my powerpoint slides, and then put them into their breakout rooms. I realised in my morning test run that Teams wouldn't allow me to send images, so I'd created a draft email with the dingbats beforehand, which I sent out straight after putting everyone back into their breakout rooms. I made sure that the dingbats were varying degrees of difficulty, then gave everyone 5 minutes to figure out as many as they could, When the five minutes were up, each team sent in their answers, and I went through the correct answers in the main room using my powerpoint slides again. I did the third round in the same way as the general knowledge round, and after going through the answers we had a 10 minute break.
I used the break to add up each team's scores in order to generate a bit of competition, and refill my glass of wine (which I could conveniently drink throughout whilst sending the questions to the breakout rooms). After that, we started Round 4: Guess Who. In the weeks leading up to the social, I'd asked several members of the team for a fun fact that others might not know about them, and the fourth round of the quiz consisted of stating these facts, as the teams guessed who they referred to. We went through the answers in the usual way, and then I had to calculate the final scores. Instead of doing this in silence or having another break, I decided it was the perfect opportunity for bonus points; I kept everyone in the main room and gave them a certain puzzle which I'd been given whilst in Japan, and the first person to figure it out would earn an extra 3 points for their team. It was hard enough to give me time to calculate the scores, but not too hard that people gave up quickly.
After adding up all the scores, I announced them in reverse order and for the rest of the social we just chatted. The quiz went much better than I could've hoped for and I ended up really enjoying the evening. I'd recommend this format for hosting a virtual quiz as it gives the host time to relax, whilst still being interactive and makes calculating scores very easy. For the participants it's very easy too since they simply need to join one platform and only the team captain has to write the answers out, and we already have our next two socials in the making!
*https://www.buzzfeed.com/robinedds/can-you-name-the-london-tube-station-from-a-visual-riddle
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