Social Programming Ideas

Social Programming

Creating virtual social events may be one of the best options for your institutions to showcase its vibrant campus culture and activities. There are dozens of ways to use events in Wisr to gather your prospective and current students and alumni virtually to participate in fun social activities. Keep in mind that you could always partner with campus colleagues to help plan social events for your constituents. Is that resource available to you?

Here are some suggestions to get you started and what you will need to pull off a fun event!

Movie Nights

The new Chrome plugin Netflix Party allows people across the world to watch the same movie at the same time. A Netflix account holder should visit the Netflix Party website to install the Chrome extension link. Once installed, select a movie (create a poll through your survey tool for students to vote on which movie to watch) and click the “NP” button on your browser to the right of the address bar. Start your party to generate a specific Netflix Party URL to share. Everyone will be able to view the movie simultaneously and the host has the ability to pause if an intermission is needed. There is even a chat function for what used to be annoying theater whispers. Netflix has set high a 500,000 viewer limit on streams so there is plenty of room to accommodate your whole group.

Trivia Contests

Use a user-friendly platform like Kahoot! or Mentimeter to develop your own questions and build a trivia game.  Many institutions already have accounts with Kahoot! and Mentimeter (or the free versions should suffice for your game). As you write your trivia questions, focusing on campus traditions or institutional history is a fun way to learn more about your school. You can even host multiple trivia nights and theme them, for example: Campus Traditions, College History, Famous Faces at WisrU, College Sports, etc. There are also several free trivia question generators available online if you want a more traditional trivia game with questions covering various topics.

To host the trivia game and share it with your members, use Zoom Webinar and post the link in a Wisr event. Events can be for all your members or limited to certain communities (remember that Zoom Webinar has limits on the number of participants, so if you intend to have more than 100 participants, you’ll need to upgrade your account). Participants can log into play or just watch and use the chat functions to communicate with their peers during the game. Participants will need to be logged into both the Zoom Event as well as the trivia management system to play. We suggest using two devices if possible.

At the event time, start the Zoom a few minutes earlier than the game, have a slide ready with instructions on how to get into the game’s site with the code to play. Players will see the questions through the Zoom Webinar and can answer questions on their second device, most easily their phone. At the start of the game, the moderator should share their screen and might want to play some Jeopardy-like music.

For an hour-long game, we suggest having about 50 - 60 questions ready. Provide participants about 20 seconds to answer each question; after results are in, the moderator can provide more details or background about that tradition or provide a personal anecdote.

Be sure to tell players up front what they are competing for: Prizes? Fame and glory? Bragging rights? All of the above?

Roommate Game (or other team competition formatted games)

The college version of the classic Dating Game, the Roommate Game, can be played via Zoom Webinar just like you would play in person. Staff will need to identify contestants to play prior to the scheduled event as well as prepare the questions that will be part of the game. Some residence assistants colleagues have done us a solid by creating samples of three rounds of questions and you can always modify or create your own.

Create a Zoom Webinar Event for your selected date and time. Contestants should be invited to join the event at least 30 minutes in advance so they can record their answers to the questions before viewers join. This will avoid viewers watching contestants write down their responses. While it would be easy to send the contestants the questions in advance, there would be no way to determine if the “couples” were not corresponding to sync up their answers.

Contestants should write their answers in large print on a sheet of white paper with a dark marker. They may want to use a clipboard or book behind the paper to create a more solid surface so their papers are not flapping in the breeze thereby making them easier for viewers to read.

When contestants are on the Webinar, the moderator should share their screen and make each of the contestants a panelist in the webinar so they appear live on screen. To ease confusion on which “couples” are paired, consider using a unique virtual background for each pair to assist viewers since the couples might not appear side by side on screen.

When the public event starts, viewers can watch the questions being asked and how respondents answer. If you have never seen an episode of the Dating Game before, it may be worth the moderator catching a YouTube episode so they can prepare to their best Chuck Woolery impersonation.

Keep an eye on the chat function for the side commentary of your viewers. And of course, prizes for the winning pair!

Game Nights

Multiple services are offer virtual game nights for little to no cost that can accommodate group games. Here are just a few examples that we found.

• Scattergories via Zoom through a free app
• Heads up via the free House Party app
• Join a Zoom to play cards and other favorites via the free Playing Cards app
• Jackbox games offers a more irreverent set of game options right from web browsers
• The App Store and Google Play offer a variety of long-standing family-favorite games that can be multi-player including Scrabble, Uno, Yahtzee, and Boggle. Students can download the app on their device and join a Zoom call with a small group to compete in a synched game while chatting live
• Low-cost Virtual Bingo

Fitness Classes

Online fitness classes have become the rage in recent months and your campus can offer students and alumni classes taught by your own athletics and physical education coaches, faculty, staff, and students. Classes can be offered live in a Webinar format and recorded and posted for later viewing. Use these classes as an opportunity to introduce a healthy start to college for students showcasing the normal offerings from your institution, and perhaps consider throwing in some special opportunities and works outs – how do your football players stay fit over the summer?

Activities/Resources Fairs

Thinking about how to host a virtual activities or resource fair is a complicated matter. We liken the situation to a virtual career fair, and to really replicate the best experience possible would mean needing to contract a separate and expensive platform to create the most similar experience of having 300+ tables out on your central quad for students and/or alumni to mix and mingle. We have come up with four alternative solutions that would allow for similar interactions, and each institution will need to decide which best fits their needs.

We will be the first to admit that none of these are likely perfect and will not be the same brisk fall breeze, free food and candy, and running into old friends fairs that we all know and love. But, they are all great options to introduce your prospecting and incoming students, and potentially even alumni, to the wide array of services available on campus and opportunities to be involved in at your institution. If done well, they could also be an unbelievable source of content and activity in your Wisr site.

1. The simplest solution using Wisr technology we can suggest is to forget what you think about an activities fair being a set date and time and instead use communities and discussion threads to allow groups and offices to interact with your constituents. With this option you will give up the campus buzz that happens during your traditional fair, but your Wisr site will be bursting with activity and these organizations will contribute content and events to further enliven your overall community. Instead of creating 400 new communities that take up valuable Wisr real estate, we suggest using your campus’s existing organizational categorization structure to create communities and allow each organization or department to have their own discussion thread. For instance, if your Division of Student Life would typically participate in a resource fair either during your summer orientation or welcome week, Student Life would be one community with threads for Student Activities, Career Services, Disability Services, Athletics, Student Health, Diversity and Inclusion, Housing and Residence Life, Spiritual Life, etc.

2. There are several companies that many higher education institutions already work with that offer virtual career fair options that would meet the needs of an activities fair. We suggest getting in touch with your campus partners in Career Services and Alumni Relations to find out if they are existing Handshake or Brazen customers. Essentially these platforms set up a “booth” for each employer which in your case would be a student organization or department, only allow a certain number of people into the booth at one time, and allow the booth attendees to chat and then move on to their next selected booth. There are processes set up for queuing and attendees can queue up in multiple booths simultaneously. The pros of these services are that they don’t require an additional contract or cost to use if your institution is already a client, they are scalable to a large activities fair format, and your participants may already be familiar with the interface. The biggest con we see is that there is only chat functionality, no video conferencing. You will have to ask yourself if besides the benefit of having an “event” like a fair, is this actually any different then discussion threads within communities on Wisr.

3. If you feel that you want to have an actual event with face to face virtual interactions within a set period of time, you could set up Zoom meetings for every student organization or department that wants to participate in the fair at a designated date and time. Each meeting would need a representative to serve as a moderator. Staff would produce a list of all fair participants’ meetings with their respective links and attendees could pop in and out of each Zoom. The pros of this option are it allows for actual talking versus just online chatting and attendees should already be familiar with the technology needed. The cons are that it would take an extraordinary amount of coordination to scale and accommodate the hundreds of participating organizations you would likely see and it would be difficult to limit the number of people in one room at any given time. While the moderator could use the waiting room/admit function of Zoom, it is unclear if it offers a first-come, first-serve option since that is not what it was designed to do.

4. The final option would be a combination of options 1 and 3. The communities and discussion threads can operate as option 1 suggests, and you could host events for each community using your existing student organization and department categorizations. Instead of picking just one date and time for your fair, schedule it over a period of several days or even weeks. Each community, or type of group, could host an event for a few hours on a designated day. For instance, if you want to host an event every weekday evening from 7 – 9 PM, Monday could be Community Service organizations, Tuesday Intramural Sports, Wednesday Cultural and Religious organizations, Thursday Arts organizations, etc. Staff would create rooms for each group similar to option 3. On the positive side, there would be fewer groups at any one time for staff to manage, but those rooms can get rather full very quickly.

Showcases

Give your current and incoming students and alumni an opportunity to share their extraordinary talents through a showcase. We recommend asking participants to submit videos of individual or group performances. These can be newly developed or perhaps you have videos available from previous student performances, concerts, or cultural shows. You are free to share resources about creating digital content that can be found in the Content Ideas Community of the Wisr Customers Network to ensure you receive high quality submissions. Review and determine which videos you want to include and schedule an event to showcase the amazing talents of your students. The live Zoom event should be hosted by an emcee and you should feature the videos in a webinar format. Expect the chat functions to go wild!

Meet-ups

Virtual meet-ups on a specific topic limited to a community or open to anyone interested are a great way to provide students and alumni with opportunities to talk about common interests in smaller groups. Using Zoom, you can set up multiple simultaneous meetings each led by a moderator. One idea is to schedule a Meet-Up Event for a more general community with separate “rooms” to get more granular. For example: Cultural Affinity Meet-Up taking place one evening for a few hours with separate meeting links for African-American students and/or alumni, Latino students and/or alumni, LGBTQ+ students and/or alumni, Asian-American students and/or alumni, etc. Network members can access the full list of available rooms in an event and join one or more conversations over the course of your event. We suggest limiting your overall event time to two to three hours at most to avoid exhausting your moderators.

Scavenger Hunts

Scavenger Hunts are a great way to allow people to show their creative sides! We learned from Scavenger Hunt experts at the University of Chicago how they launched a virtual version of their famed annual hunt.

Set up a Scavenger Hunt community to manage your Hunt and use existing communities (*hint* orientation leader, affinity, or interest groups) to serve as teams. Each team should have their own discussion thread in the Hunt community to submit their items through photos or videos. Teams can also use an alternate resource like Google Drive to collect their items and submit a link in their thread.

Hunts can be set up for a short period of time or, alternatively, have an extended hunt with weekly lists where points are accumulated through the duration of the longer program. We suggest eight to ten items per week that need to be submitted in a team’s discussion thread by a set deadline or a slightly longer list for a one-shot event.

Once the logistics are set up, you can focus on the fun aspect of the hunt, the list! We suggest incorporating list items that may draw on a person’s location, items found around the house, and activities they may already be doing. We are making some suggestions below and if you need inspiration, take a look at some of the UChicago former lists for the live Scavs. Don’t be surprised if you have to Google the items to even understand what they mean!

People are always willing to do wacky things for prizes, so if you can offer a prize for the winning team, we encourage you to do so. This might be a great opportunity to offer up a chance for the winning team to gather in person once students are on campus to celebrate with a pizza party or an ice cream social. And there’s always the old time favorite, college swag!

List ideas to get you started:

• The Leaning Tower of [insert your favorite can name here: Campbell’s, Pepsi/Coke etc. – tie in a product special to your campus or city]
• Most elaborate sand castle
• Cake decorating challenge
• Perform an original quarantine song
• Weekly step count challenge by team or individual
• Most Wisr content consumed (teams submit names, Wisr admins can verify)
• Food Network-esque demonstration by video with a secret ingredient (must include someone trying the finished product)
• TikTok Video challenge of something (team cheer, campus fight song, etc.)
• Window decorating challenge
• Toilet paper construction challenge, build a . . .
• Most institutional fitness classes completed via the Wisr community

Multi-Room/Theme Party

If you are interested in creating a party where different rooms would have different themes or entertainment, why not recreate that event at home? Different vibes for different spaces! Create Zoom links for each room and set a vibe:

• Dance party in the ballroom/living room – hire your favorite campus DJ to spin.
• Snacks in the coffee shop/kitchen – is it weird to eat and drink while on Zoom? Not if everyone is doing it!
• Zen space in the lounge/den, chill out and chat with your classmates
• Game night in the game room – see the Game Night options above.
• Live performance of your favorite local cover band.