Do you consider yourself a good host or hostess? How do you go about planning an event? If you’ve agreed to host a trivia night and found yourself completely lost with the organization, let us help you! We’ve prepared 11 essential steps for assembling any trivia night, whether a pub quiz or a get-together at home. Don’t think too far ahead! Just follow the steps below and watch your trivia night take shape.
Pick a Theme
The first step is crucial to guaranteeing a successful trivia night. Picking a theme early on will save you lots of trouble and confusion. Before you get too overwhelmed, your theme can simply be general knowledge. There is no need to make all your questions about Harry Potter or Christmas. However, knowing the theme early is good if you plan on doing that.
Let’s say Halloween is just around the corner, and, like any good American, you want to capitalize on the unofficial holiday and throw a party while you’re at it. Picking Halloween as your theme and sticking to it will allow you to get a head start on sourcing decorations, selecting question categories, designing invitations, and more. Many elements of a trivia game can be inspired by a theme: think snacks, decor, and marketing, not to mention the questions and prizes.
At the same time, your theme doesn’t have to affect the questions. You can keep your general knowledge trivia and dedicate only a category to Halloween, or not even that. A trivia game with a theme is a lot of fun, but a well-organized general knowledge trivia night is magical in its own way, too!
Source the Questions
Now that you have your theme—Halloween, favorite movie/book series, or general knowledge—you are ready to start sourcing content for your trivia game. Before you get down to it, it’s a good idea to think about how you want to structure your game. Ask yourself the following questions:
- How long should my trivia game be?
- How many categories should I include?
- How many questions should each round have?
- What categories should I implement?
- Will I source the questions or purchase a set online?
As for the game, we recommend making it anywhere between one and two hours long. There can be five to ten rounds with ten questions in each round. These numbers are common practice for many trivia games you will find online. Of course, there is no reason you should stick to them very strictly. You can deviate from them regarding the number of rounds or questions. However, we recommend that you don’t make your game too long. After two hours of continuous playing, people may start to get bored.
When it comes to the questions themselves, you can find them yourself or buy a set for your game. You can find inexpensive question sets online. Some trivia companies even offer subscriptions, with new trivia questions arriving in your email weekly or monthly. If you want to outsource question creation completely, you can find whole trivia games in the form of presentations online that come complete with answer sheets.
If you have some time to spend, finding trivia questions online isn’t hard. Simply type the topics you’re looking for into your favorite search engine, and you’ll get a bunch of leads. You can also visit a trivia website like Trivia Bliss and look for questions there. There is a whole page filled with different questions separated into categories. In addition to that, you will find ready-made quizzes about your favorite topics, like Game of Thrones, Vampire Diaries, or the fall season.
Finally, if you choose to write all the questions yourself, you’re very brave! It may take a while, but it will be worth it. Follow these 10 tips for writing good trivia questions to ensure you come up with something interesting for your trivia game.
Regardless of the method of question acquisition you choose, don’t forget about the tiebreaker. You need a tiebreaker just in case your game ends in a tie. If you want to be sure, just in case, have some extra questions stowed away. Additionally, don’t underestimate the power of an audiovisual round! People love to guess songs, actors, movie scenes, and singers. Staring at writing on a screen for two hours can get old fast. Spice it up with an audiovisual round or question!
Find a Host
Where you find the ideal host for your trivia night will depend entirely on the scale of the event you’re planning. You can host the quiz yourself if you’re organizing a small get-together with friends. You can also host it yourself if it’s at a bar or a bigger venue and you feel confident interacting with a crowd of people.
Finding a host for your trivia night is not difficult. You can look for an experienced host online. Platforms like upwork.com and freelancer.com tend to have all types of freelancers up for grabs, though finding someone in your area may be a bit more challenging. You can’t go wrong with a classic master of ceremonies; they know how to entertain a crowd and don’t hesitate to communicate.
Another alternative is outsourcing the whole trivia night to a trivia company. If you live in a relatively big city, you will find a number of companies willing to take over the planning and execution for a price. This may be the easiest option if you don’t have much time to dedicate to the event.
Whoever you choose, be it you or a professional host, make sure that person is communicative, extraverted, and confident. A trivia quiz is not only about the questions but also about the atmosphere and entertainment. The host can make or break the event, so choose wisely.
Pick a Location
Those of you throwing a quiz night in your living room, consider yourselves lucky! You don’t need to struggle to find and secure a venue in your budget. Additionally, if you’re hosting a trivia night at your school, university, friend’s apartment, or parent’s house, you’ve probably got your venue sorted already.
If the above paragraph doesn’t apply to you, now is the time to start looking for a venue for your trivia night. Your final selection will depend on the size of the event and your budget. You can reach out to local pubs and bars; they may want to work with you because you’d be bringing them all these paying customers. Most smaller bars won’t say no if you also give them a percentage of the profit.
You can rent a conference room or event space if you have a bigger budget. That will allow you to do whatever you want with the space: bring in catering, decorate, throw a party. The biggest downside of this option is money, but if you have it, you might as well spend it on a nice location for your quiz night.
Market the Event
At this stage, you should have your quiz prepared, your venue secured, and your host ready. Though you still need some equipment, you could probably run a trivia night successfully given some guests. So, it’s time to move on to the more abstract things, like marketing.
Marketing the event is necessary for those who have never run a trivia night before. If you’re hosting a trivia night for your friends at home, you need to send them invitations that would indicate where and when the event will take place. Should your event’s purpose be financial gain, your marketing efforts will need to be more intense.
There are things you can do online and offline to market your event. The simplest (though arguably most time-consuming) thing would be to print a bunch of flyers and hang them up all around the neighborhood. Believe it or not, it works! It will cost you next to nothing and you will get the attention of your neighbors. Then, you should reach out to the venue and ask them to market your event. You can hang flyers on the door, in the bathroom, and on the bar of the pub you’re having your trivia night in. The staff in the bar can also talk about your event to their patrons.
Moving on to the digital methods, the venue can post about the event on their social media accounts. You can do the same! It may be even more effective to publish a paid ad on Instagram or Facebook for a few days leading up to the event, inviting people to sign up. Spread the word through trivia-related online communities on Facebook, Reddit, and other platforms.
Naturally, the bigger your budget, the more you can do with marketing. If you don’t have a ton of money to invest and want to grow organically, it’s worth it to start talking about your trivia night way before the date of the event. That way people will get to know you better. Don’t be afraid to ask the venue for help! If they’re letting you host a trivia night, chances are, they’ll be forthcoming.
Source the Prizes
Though this isn’t always necessary, it’s a nice touch. Bigger trivia events will often give money, gift cards, or vouchers to use in the bar where the event is held. You can ask the bar to give the winning team an extra pitcher of beer or a plate of wings. Gift cards, no matter the amount, are also highly effective.
Often, it’s not about the gift itself but how you present it. If you’re having a get-together with the girls, prepare a goodie bag for the winner. You can include some nail polish, hair ties, perfume samples, and other trinkets that don’t cost a lot. If you need some inspiration, check out this list of epic prizes.
Prizes are optional, but they can serve as extra motivation for the attendees!
Source the Hardware
If you’ve been a guest at trivia nights, you know that there are different ways to play. Mainly, there is the old-school way and the new-school way. The old-school way refers to the pen-and-paper way, marking your answers on a sheet of paper and having until the end of the round to correct them, at which point the host goes around and collects the answer sheets.
The more modern way to play is using tablets or phones. Some trivia night providers or bars buy or rent tablets for this purpose. Players can mark their answers on the tablet without returning to correct them. Some companies put the game in an online format, sharing a link with all the players and allowing them to play using their phones.
Of course, bringing a phone into the equation increases the possibility of cheating. At the same time, playing with mobile devices simplifies the scoring process; the program does it all for you. However, once a team has chosen their answer, there is no going back. At the same time, the old-fashioned way is a lot cheaper, as you don’t have to invest in hardware.
You might need to rent some iPads or print answer sheets and buy pens to allow your players to answer questions. Though the second option is cheaper, the first will elevate the quality of your games and might become a great investment. Other hardware you can purchase, or rent, is buzzers. Buzzers will make contestants feel like they’re on a real game show. Who wouldn’t love that! It’s another hefty investment, but it might just be worth it.
Finally, think about how you’re going to present your quiz. If you want to pull up your questions on a big screen, ensure you have a screen you can connect to your computer. If you want to use a microphone to communicate with your audience, ensure the venue has one or source one yourself. Think about everything you might need.
Decorate the Venue
This is where step one comes in. If you chose a theme for your trivia night, you could now bring out your inner interior designer. You don’t have to do a lot if you don’t want to. At the same time, if you enjoy decorating, you can go all out. After all, who doesn’t love a theme? You can buy inexpensive decor pieces in your local supermarket or party store. Alternatively, try making some pieces yourself using the things you have at home. It all depends on the theme and budget.
This might also be the time to think about any themed drinks or snacks you’d like to provide. This applies mostly to at-home trivia games, as cooking up special sharing platters may be easy. If you’re organizing a big event with catering, you can get the food to match the overall vibe too.
Do a Practice Run
Now is the time to combine all the elements you’ve been working hard on and see what you’ve got. You don’t have to run the whole quiz with all the questions and answers, but it’s worth it to make sure all your equipment is working. Can you connect your computer with the presentation to the big screen? Is the microphone working? Are the speakers turned on?
Doing a practice run the night before may give you enough time to make some last-minute corrections. If your microphone malfunctions, there’s still time to get a new one. If you notice an error in the presentation, you can still fix it. Don’t underestimate the importance of a practice run.
Host the Event
It’s finally the night you’ve been planning and waiting for. You’re ready to entertain your guests and let your quiz shine bright. After your practice run, you’ve figured out all the last-minute fixes last night, and are excited to start the show. If you’ve decided to host the event, enjoy it to the max! You’re not just there to entertain your guests; you can also have fun. When you feel nervous, remember that it’s just people you’re interacting with, fellow humans looking for a good time.
Do It All Again
After the quiz night, it’s time to analyze and evaluate your performance. Did the event live up to your expectations? Would you do it all again? If you think your experience was valuable and want to continue growing as a quizmaster/trivia game organizer, you can use your knowledge to create another trivia night. Now you know what to pay attention to, remember what last-minute fixes you had to make, and you’re ready to try something new regarding themes. Use your platform to put together another successful event and grow in the sphere of trivia!
What Rules Do You Need to Have in Place?
A trivia game is no fun if you don’t have any rules. This may sound annoying to all you free spirits out there, but having rules is what makes it a game. Here are some to consider:
- Determine how much time the teams will have to submit their final answers.
- Decide if you’ll let them go back and change their answers before the end of the round.
- Determine what constitutes cheating and what the repercussions are.
- Specify how many people can be on one team.
How Many Questions Do You Need to Host Trivia Night?
The exact amount of question you need will depend on the desired length of the trivia game. Most trivia companies recommend five to ten rounds with ten questions in each. That should last anywhere between one and two hours. Of course, the more questions you have, the better. You can always end the game prematurely, but you can’t think up new questions on the spot. Count with 50-100 questions in regular rounds, plus a tie breaker.
How to Host Trivia Night at a Bar
You can use the 11 steps in this article to host a trivia night at a bar. Here, the main stressor is the equipment. You need to make sure you get all your hardware right before the start of the game. For more detailed instructions, check out this step-by-step guide.
How to Host a Trivia Night Fundraiser
Planning a fundraiser trivia night is very similar to planning a regular trivia night. The major difference is – you need to raise money. Depending on your affiliation with the organization you’re raising money for, you can donate all the proceeds from the sale of tickets or set up a separate donation box and encourage players to donate. Follow this guide to find out how to host a trivia night fundraiser.
How to Host a Virtual Trivia Night
We had the chance to realize how lucky we are to have all this technology during lockdown in 2020. Now, hosting a virtual trivia night doesn’t sound crazy anymore! In fact, it’s quite easy to organize. All you really need is video-chatting software like Zoom and a stable internet connection. Follow this guide for hosting a virtual trivia night.
Hosting Trivia Night at Home
An at-home trivia night is as much of an event as a pub quiz. Your greatest benefit is that you don’t have to look for a venue and pay rent. At the same time, you still need to worry about all the other things mentioned in this guide, like sourcing the questions, preparing prizes, and decorating your space. Disregard the paragraphs about finding a host and a venue and focus on all the other elements of your trivia game.
Final Words
A trivia night is an event like any other and you need to put some thought into it. Whether you’re having your friends over for a game of Trivial Pursuit or renting a conference room for a trivia night fundraiser, this guide can help you understand where to start. Don’t overwhelm yourself and get ready for your trivia night step-by-step.
Do you have a trick for hosting a successful trivia night? Share it with your fellow trivia lovers in the comments!
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