Next up in our corporate event planning series, we’re diving into Virtual Events.
If you’re rolling your eyes at the thought of a virtual event, it’s likely because you’ve attended one too many virtual “happy” hours. Getting lost in a sea of tiles on a Zoom screen does not inspire relationship building. When planning a successful virtual event, plan by keeping in mind that the ROI should be a stronger and closer corporate culture.
We are not judging if you’ve thrown a virtual happy hour, virtual events are relatively new. Instead, we’re here to help you throw a virtual event with some wow factor that will keep your employees engaged and looking forward to the next virtual event.
The best part about virtual events is the facilitation of them: they are budget friendly and schedule conscious. You can easily fit an event into a lunch hour and continue the rest of your day, business as usual. There’s no commuting, no down time and no logistical considerations. If your team is fully remote, we recommend a virtual event at least once per quarter. If you have a fast growing team, we recommend twice a quarter or once per month to accommodate socialization of your new hires.
Virtual events can be customized to be as complex as a full scale party with activities and entertainment or as simple as a quick one hour break game. Here are our favorites:
Virtual Photo Bingo: Our favorite easy and quick virtual game is Photo Bingo. When new hires have joined the team remotely, their colleagues become just names, emails and departments. With Virtual Photo Bingo, you engage employees and prompt them to put a face to the name of their colleagues. You can fit this into a lunch hour for employees to meet with their colleagues and take a break from work.
Here’s the rundown:
Employees receive a unique image to add as their background on their video conferencing platform
Virtual bingo boards are created using the words from the background images
Everyone joins a video conference together and people are separated into smaller randomized breakout rooms for a few minutes to find the images on their bingo cards and write down the names of the people who have those backgrounds
Between sessions, employees are brought back to the main meeting and re-shuffled into randomized breakout rooms to repeat the activity
After the allotted time for the event, winners are asked to do a screen capture of their winning bingo board and send the results to the host
We created a free guide with everything you need to run your own photo bingo game with your team with step-by-step instructions. You can download it here!
Social Q & A Event: In most company-wide video conferences, there are always the select few extroverts that handle the majority of the conversations and participation. There’s also the employees who are more comfortable with each other, whether they were formerly in an office together or because they have created friendships with new people within the company since going remote. To get everyone involved and talking, we love hosting Social Q & A events. Here’s how it works:
Every employee receives a randomly selected question before the event. For example:
What movie do you wish you could watch again for the first time?
What is your most used phone app?
What reality show would you want to be on?
Everyone joins a video conference together and people are separated into smaller randomized breakout rooms for a few minutes to ask their questions. To make things easy, work the room alphabetically.
Each person will read their question and answer it and go around the room for other people to answer the same question. Depending on the room size, you should be able to read through 1-2 questions in each breakout session.
Reshuffle the rooms every few minutes (7-10 minutes) and start over!
This is a great event to have before a holiday like 4th of July or Thanksgiving because you can host it as a lunch and provide food delivery gift cards to everyone as a special treat! With Thanksgiving coming up, we created a template that includes an invitation and 40 unique questions. If you send out physical items for an event, this can be printed as a double sided invitation or emailed to each member of your team. If you have more than 40 employees, you can repeat the questions for multiple employees. Download the template here.
Full Scale Virtual Party: These are the most complex to plan but definitely the most fun with the highest culture ROI. There are three elements to an amazing virtual party:
Tangible goods
Breakout room activities
Entertainment
The most impactful element here is Tangible Goods. When planning a virtual holiday party, it is the perfect time to include physical holiday gifts for your team. We recommend sizeless, genderless gifts that can be easily branded like blankets, backpacks, umbrellas, portable chargers, weekender bags, etc. If you have a smaller team, you can select more personalized items like jackets or other clothing.
These items will need to be mailed to employees and we love creating custom mailer boxes for the occasion. Our favorite packaging partner is Packlane but there are several others that are competitive as far as pricing and customer service. The delta between a blank mailer box and a custom design box is a few dollars and if your budget can swing it, we highly recommend it! You can create your own or follow our template for this box:
You’ll need two things to edit this box:
Tip: Add your logo to the Cover Image Template and download as PNG with a Transparent Background. Replace the existing image on the box by selecting the “Top” side and you’re all set!
While we’re mailing things, we love to provide kits to do activities together. Here are some of our favorites:
Gingerbread Houses: Everyone builds their gingerbread houses together, over video conference
Painting kits (Canvas + Paint): Give everyone a set design to paint and compare paintings
Lego kits: Everyone receives the same kit and can compete for who builds it fastest in their breakout room
Clay design: Similar to painting, everyone receives an image and tries to replicate it with clay
These activities get everyone involved and interacting with each other about the task while being budget friendly and unique.
After doing small group socialization activities, we like to bring everyone back together for some entertainment. For entertainment, we love to do either stand up comedy or a magician. For both, a conversation beforehand on topics that are off limits and general HR guidelines is always a good idea.
Once you have come up with your activities, entertainment, employee gifts and mailing boxes, the flow of your event will look a little bit like this:
We recommend 2-3 breakout room activities where you can shuffle the employees around for maximum socialization. You can edit this schedule through our template here.
All in, you can expect to pay about $150-200 per employee for an all out, engaging virtual event. The breakdown will look a bit like this:
Boxes: $10
Postage: $15-20
Three activities: $30-$50
Employee Gift: $75-100
Entertainment (One-time, not per employee): $500-$1000
Virtual parties require a lot of planning and patience to create a truly memorable event but we can promise you it is worth every bit of effort. If you are interested in hosting a virtual event for your team but don’t have the bandwidth, we’re here to help. Let us handle all the heavy lifting so all you have to do is have fun with your team! Let’s get in touch.