How We Organized an Online Pub Quiz For Our Students

by Dominik Bošnjak, SG Head of Marketing & Clubs

Who?

RIT Croatia Zagreb campus Student Government

Where?

In an online realm (that is, via Zoom meeting with teams communicating on different platforms)

What?

Organizing Virtual Pub Quiz event

When?

Thursday, 8th October

Why?

To help foster student life at RIT Croatia, to connect students better in these times.

How?

By good organization and teamwork between SG representatives

Yep, COVID-19 has made socializing difficult…

Croatian pub quiz scene has risen in popularity over the last few years. No matter what interests you in life, having fun over a few drinks in a nice cozy pub, while competing with other teams who came to the quiz for the same reason as you, to have fun, is an amazing experience. Also, we must be honest, people love to compete too, and by allowing them to compete against other people who love to compete and see who is better, that can be really exciting. If you then include the prize for the winning team and funny consolidation prizes for other teams that were less successful, you can have a "jackpot" event. For the last few years it is also known that pub quizzes are getting really popular among students, and not only to participate in them but they are eager to organize their own.

So we said "let's give it a shot", and in the fall semester of 2019, we have organized our first RIT pub quiz event. It was a live pub quiz event and it was an instant success! We had 14 teams that participated and all of us had great fun that evening. Since then we were planning to organize a pub quiz again, but COVID-19 came along and the whole concept of our plan changed. Classes were moved online, live events were not an option, and the whole country was in quarantine, but our efforts to provide RIT Croatia students with quality events stayed, and this semester we have decided to raise the pub quiz idea "from the ashes".

...but not impossible!

Thanks to our innovative SG team we have made a great plan of an even better event. Previous experience gathered by participating in pub quizzes and the organization challenges we have faced, gave us a clear picture of what we need to improve, but unfortunately because of COVID-19 all live events on campus were canceled. This has left us in a dilemma should we cancel the event, but still we have proceeded with our idea and adapted to the situation by creating an online pub quiz event. Thanks to good marketing promotion, innovative ideas, and a good structured plan we have managed to reach out to a lot of our colleagues and get them interested in joining our virtual event.

What if it does not go well?

As an event was approaching we must admit we were a little bit nervous, everything depended on this first event, if the first one goes well it will be amazing, and we will definitely have interested individuals and teams for the future quizzes, but there was always a question "what if it doesn't go so well?". Even if the implementation goes as great as we planned, what if a small number of people shows up, what if the questions will be too easy or too hard, will it be interesting enough, this was our first time organizing a virtual pub quiz event in a real pub quiz form. The evening of the quiz came. The only thing that kept us calm, was the fact that we already knew that we had at least 10 teams who applied before the quiz.

But what if it does ☺?

As soon as the Zoom meeting started and people joined in, we knew it would be a fun evening. Everybody were in a good mood cracking jokes and waiting impatiently for the first round, we explained the quiz rules quickly and after we had set all the prerequisites, we started with the first round. Round one passed by, then round two, three and we got our best four final teams which were ready to participate in the final round. Rounds were challenging with all kinds of questions such as written, association and estimation, but our eager competing teams did great. After a challenging final round we had our winner, a team called "Smart people & Niksa" which won the quiz prize. But the other three teams were breathing behind their necks all the way till the end. We have collected the surveys from the teams after the quiz which gave us the insights of what people liked and disliked about the event, and if they are looking forward to the next pub quiz in our organization.

Join us on our next online event!

Happy that we have provided good fun for all our participants and we would like to invite all other interested colleagues to join us on our next pub quiz event. If the future events will be successful as the first one or even more successful, we have an amazing idea about RIT pub quiz league, but that is a story for some near future. Until then we hope you will support us in our endeavors to make our campus a place with a fun and interesting student life.