In October 2020, Pigeonhole Live celebrated our 10th birthday. These are strange circumstances to celebrate a company milestone in; the global pandemic had shifted our entire team to work remotely since early this year.
We had to find a way to plan a remote birthday party for the orange pigeon that was interactive, fun, and brought everyone together the way we used to come together. But how?
A big part of throwing a remote birthday party was ensuring that everyone’s definition of fun was met. We’ve thrown quite a few standard birthday celebrations in Pigeonhole Live, with cake and embarrassingly loud singing, but we knew that virtual activities and socialising would have to be done differently.
To ensure that we got it right, we lined up many options for potential virtual activities, from virtual escape rooms to simply hanging out on social platform Gather Town, and let the whole company vote on the ones they wanted on a Pigeonhole Live survey. Most importantly, we added the option “Others”, which allowed people to suggest their own ideas of activities to get more ideas.
Among Us and Scribbl.io turned out to be the popular choices, so we ended up playing these virtual games as part of our team celebrations.
Once we had a party itinerary in place, we shared it with the rest of the company with a link to a Q&A. This Q&A was left open up till the day of the event to easily streamline the flow of questions regarding the party. Questions were then easily replied using the Answers feature to provide a place for others to refer to should they have the same question.
Hosting a virtual party with several people, it can be hard to get people to speak up over the call. We had a chat open on our Audience Web App so that we could get people interacting on the same platform as the itinerary and other interactive elements coming up.
It helped warm up the crowd, and allowed them to chime in as the activities went on, keeping interactions organic and casual. This was especially fun during our throwback presentation, chock full of nostalgic shots of the old Pigeonhole Live product, our many milestones, and old (and embarrassing) photos of our managers.
This picture was a crowd favourite. Check out the tech!
Our quiz feature is a regular favourite for birthday celebrations in the Pigeonhole Live team. For usual birthday celebrations, we would collect trivia about the birthday person as a way to get to know the person better. For monthly birthday celebrations, this could be a joint trivia quiz about all the birthday people.
For Pigeonhole Live’s birthday celebration, we went all out and had three quizzes in a row. This not only allowed us to have quizzes about different subjects, but also varied the winners. A 10-question quiz takes anything between 10-15 minutes, so three quizzes (with plenty of laughter in between) filled up a good amount of an hour.
These are the quizzes we ran:
This quiz helped to warm up the crowd. The ‘randomness’ of the questions also sparked laughter.
This quiz helped to get everyone to get to know the company’s history a little better, and even spark some nostalgia.
A company is built by its people. This quiz focuses on the people in the company. Collecting two true statements and one false statement from ten random people across departments, it’s a fun way to get to know each other beyond the usual facts that come up during a personal introduction.
For instance, we found out that at least two of our team members did Taekwondo, though only one of them has a black belt.
Spoiler alert: it’s not Mark.
While these are ways that we had used Pigeonhole Live during our 10th anniversary celebration, there are many more ways you could celebrate birthdays in your workplace using Pigeonhole Live.
Here are some examples:
Virtual Birthday Card: Open an Open-Ended Poll and allow everyone to write their birthday wishes!
Birthday Person Trivia Quiz: How much do you really know about the person celebrating their birthday? Run a quiz to test the company and make the birthday person the star of the show.
Birthday Q&A: Use this as an opportunity to learn more about the birthday person. Open a Q&A and allow everyone to ask them questions.
Word Cloud: Get everyone to write a word or emoji that best describes the birthday person and create a touching visual.
Favourite Moments: Create an Open-Ended Poll and crowdsource everyone’s favourite moment with the birthday person. It’s like a virtual birthday card with a twist, and brings everyone down memory lane together.
Create a free Pigeonhole Live account and try it out for yourself!