The Friday Night Inn
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We won’t lie, here at The Crane Event, we’re self-confessed social butterflies (kinda handy in the events world) and, like everyone, we’re finding this lockdown tough. What used to be a usual Friday night down the pub catching up with friends is now spent playing remote-control gymnastics, worried that we’re about to complete Netflix! (Oh hello, Disney+!)
However, social distancing doesn’t mean anti-social and with all the video call platforms out there (Zoom, Houseparty, Microsoft Teams, etc) your Friday nights down the pub can continue, just y’know, without being asked to leave at closing time.
So with that in mind, us social butterflies refused to have our wings clipped, and opened up the doors to our first virtual pub, The Crane Event style . . .
The invitation
As with all gatherings, parties and events, getting people to know that it’s happening is crucial, but sometimes overlooked. Setting up a private event on Facebook and creating a bespoke banner via Canva helped us give a sense of occasion to our selected invitees.
Event and location details were given including the virtual room URL, as well as utilising the discussion facility to provide updates and build excitement leading up to the evening.
The beer
A way of not leaving our favourite community space (the pub) behind, we encouraged those who like a tipple to get in contact with their local alehouse as many of these venues are left holding stock. Many establishments offer a take-out option with 2-pint carriers for your favourite ales and craft beers and are happy to sell if they can.
The platform
After trying several different platforms, we felt Zoom was the best for our needs. Utilising the free functionality offered, it allowed us to invite up to 100 people for a maximum of 40 minutes. We planned to continue the chats by scheduling other rooms available for people to jump to after the 40 minutes, however, Zoom has kindly taken this limit away during these uncertain times. Yay, Zoom!
We then fed back information via the Facebook event page giving the technophobes (and those new to the platform) simple instructions on how to operate it with ease.
Full disclosure, we signed in early and had a good 20 minutes of guest confusion, which soon turned to chaos and much laughter when people discovered the virtual background feature!
Top tips:
Don’t expect everyone to automatically understand the technology no matter how intuitive you think it is. Simple graphics telling people how to unmute the microphones, turn on/turn off the camera are super useful.
An example of simple instructions to help your friends navigate the platform quickly!
When scheduling the meeting, go to settings and, as host, set the video so all microphones are muted when they first sign on. When you have 40+ people on a call, you can thank us!
As a host, you can mute everyone during the call if and when needed (again, you can thank us later).
The quiz
When face-to-face events used to be a thing (remember those!) we used many different types of interactive solutions such as Slido, Pollev and Mentimeter for interactive polls. Taking our experiences, we decided to utilise the ‘Competitions’ section on Pollev. 25 people are allowed to access the poll via the free version, but with many in couples, we were still able to welcome our 40+ guests to play.
Guests accessed the quiz via a QR code we created and answered the questions with their smartphones which not only added an interactive element, but also stopped them from the quizmaster's mortal enemy, Google.
Offering a multiple-choice option within ‘Competitions’ obviously differentiates it from a ‘real’ pub quiz however, we found this to be the fairest way to proceed. This meant that people isolating by themselves could still feel included and, more importantly, using the polling function, it meant we didn’t have to do all the blooming adding up!
The quiz was broken down into four different sections with ten questions in each...
General knowledge
Film
Music
All about… (a section based on one person in the group’s life e.g. what movie won the Oscar the year they were born)
...and off we went. Using Zoom’s screen sharing facility we were able to show the questions via the Pollev platform and control all the transitions to their devices.
An example of how the question and mutiple choice answers display
Top tips:
After each question, ‘Competitions’ on Pollev shows the percentage of people who voted for each answer and then a leaderboard after each and every question. This was a great feature to give people an idea of how the system worked but not sustainable for the entire quiz. To add an air of mystery, you can simply integrate and download Pollev into Google Slides and then delete all leaderboard slides until the end of each round.
Set time limits to responses to stop people (not naming names) googling the answers and to give points for the fastest finger (Pollev will work this out for you)!
Test all systems first to check they are up and running and you are comfortable around them. If things do go wrong, smile, laugh, maybe have another drink.
Remember to have toilet breaks and top-ups!
And with that in mind, we were set, ‘The Just Inn’ (no, we will not apologise for that one) was open and this time, there were no ‘last orders’. Drinks were drunk, quizzers were quizzed, and most importantly, old friends were able to check in on each other, laugh and while we couldn’t go ‘out out’, we could still bring the outside in.
PS: The Hangover
After all is said and done, do remember to drink sensibly, stay safe and despite the virtual nature of the event, there is absolutely nothing virtual about the very real, and very painful hangover.
