5 creative Ways to Keep Your Virtual Happy Hours Happy

So gather up your plans, and friends and colleagues near and far, and host a virtual happy hour. It will be fun to stay up late and chat, meet new friends and maybe even create new memories. You’ll be glad you did!

Here are our top tips for planning, themes, and activities to help you host a virtual happy hour that your coworkers will love. Ready

Cover Your Bases

You’ll want to make sure that your computer has a strong connection, speakers and webcam are working smoothly, and you have plenty of beverages at hand. Check the website you’re planning to use for the ‘party’ to see if there are any special requirements.

Choosing a Theme for Your Virtual Happy Hour

You can choose a theme depending on your favorite hobbies, Career Avenue or any other topic you want to share. Here are some themes we’ve seen used before:

• Bubbly Beverages and Business Card Exchange – Remember, at happy hour people always exchange their business cards. So why not create a fun business card exchange with some bubbly drinks? This way people can mix and mingle while collecting lots of new contacts.
• Cinema Art Gallery Opening – You never know who might be inspired by your work. Create an art gallery opening, complete with digital guest book/sign in sheets, and a photo booth to share your art with the world!
• Experimental Cooking Demonstration – If you have a particular skill like experimental cooking, or even baking, show it off at happy hour. Plan out your recipes ahead of time and make sure they are quick enough for a virtual audience. Then let everyone know when you start to prepare your dishes and your guests can watch as you go.
• Happy Hour Bingo – Think of a theme and then create a bingo board for it. Then each time someone achieves the event/action, they mark their card or have one of the hosts call out ‘bingo’ so everyone knows that one has been achieved. Everyone then marks that activity off on their board – first one to get bingo wins!
• Hip Hop Happy Hour – Make a playlist of all your favorite hip hop songs and have people dance to them by typing in commands like ‘dance’ or ‘shake it’ into their chat box!
• Office Day – Do a Workday Happy Hour – If you’re the boss of your office, why not change up the workplace structure for one day and do an office happy hour? People can come in when they like, wear their PJs to work and hang out with colleagues. You could even hold a virtual meeting during this time (but don’t forget to give everyone a break!).

Choose a Platform

Video calls are now a norm, so finding a software for virtual meetings isn’t hard. You probably already have a favorite software for video calls, so it’s easy to schedule your happy hour with that. To schedule a virtual team meeting, there are three options that you can choose from, Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Skype. Zoom is one of the platform that I always recommend, it’s very easy to use and there is a free version for individuals.

The Easy Part…Now to have Fun

Make sure that you put the link in an email or text message along with any instructions you want your group to know. If people can’t access the link on their computer, you might want to consider a projector or television screen for people who can’t be online.

Bye-Bye, Hangovers!

Virtual happy hour is an easy way to celebrate birthdays and other special occasions without spending money on going out. So remember to schedule your next virtual happy hour on a Thursday and have all your friends over!

Furthermore, Fun trivia questions are also a great way to have fun at your virtual happy hours.  Infect, it is an innovative alternative to the traditional happy hour get together, virtual happy hours allow you to connect and celebrate without drinking alcohol. By simply providing your friends with a link to a fun website (like Trivia Happy Hour), they can immediately access an entire range of online trivia games. Fun questions and witty answers will let you connect with friends and colleagues that live across the country from you, or just down the street!