12/15/2017 0 Comments General SCAVENGER HUNT OverviewHow it came about
Just before Halloween, my husband and I attended an incredibly entertaining Halloween themed scavenger hunt. We had the greatest time and I knew that there had to be a great way to pull of a Christmas themed scavenger hunt for our families. As I was searching for scavenger hunt ideas, I kept seeing the idea for a service scavenger hunt. I knew our faith would be encouraging their annual #lighttheworld Christmas campaign, and that a service scavenger hunt would be the perfect combination of a fun scavenger hunt and a great way to serve! I decided to create a Facebook event to let all of my family know about the event. I made a public event and proceeded to comment on the event, not realizing that my Facebook friends would see that I had commented on the event and therefore know about the event. Well, my father-in-law saw my comment on the event and immediately shared it with everyone he knew. I figured, “the more the merrier”, and a few more people wouldn’t create too much extra work anyway. So instead of an activity for close friends and family this was now a public event for our whole community! Well the idea caught on like wildfire, and there were hundreds of people interested in the event in no time! The event For my event, I decided that 1-1 ½ hours was the right amount of time to keep things exciting and still accomplish a lot of good. I required that people pick up their CHRISTMAS SCAVENGER HUNT LIST at 6:00 at a local restaurant (Papa Kelsey’s Pizza & Subs agreed to sponsor my event). The teams were then required to return to the restaurant at 7:30 with their completed list. The Teams The only requirement I had for a team was that the entire team must fit SAFELY into the same vehicle. I did that primarily because I didn’t want to limit or split families from participating together. Yes, technically someone could have rented a 15 passenger van but it just seemed like the easiest limitation was by vehicle. You could limit by a specific number or any other way that seems to make sense. Advertising/Marketing the Scavenger Hunt The only advertising I did was through Facebook and my efforts were really quite minimal. I made the event and shared it on my personal page a few times over the month before. Other than that other people heard about it and shared it on their page and interest just caught on over a few weeks. Some other advertising ideas would be to post signs at the location of the event to advertise. Advertise with local news outlets (newspaper, local evening news, radio). I talked to two local companies about sponsoring the service scavenger hunt and both agreed whole-heartedly. In my experience, it is pretty easy to get a sponsor for a good cause! J I posted on the Facebook page that these two businesses were sponsoring the event and had donated prizes which helped increase event interest. List of Service Items After seeing how big this event was likely going to be, I felt a little more pressure to come up with a great list of service ideas. I didn’t want this to be a traditional scavenger hunt where you go find clues; but instead a scavenger hunt where you go find or do an act of service somewhere in the community. I knew the service items needed to include a variety of locations, different levels of physical effort required, and varying levels of financial resources, etc. I scoured the internet and Pinterest hoping to find a list I could edit and be ready to go, with little luck so I started compiling a list of all kinds of ideas. and even asked for local ideas on Facebook. I wanted this to be a fun family event where everyone could be involved, so I included service items even small children could help complete. I felt like it was important to make sure monetary donations and services weren’t required to win the Service Scavenger Hunt, so I included service ideas with varying levels of monetary contributions.
Next came the hardest part… Assigning point values to each act of service Assigning point values Deciding how many points each act of service was “worth” was the hardest part. I wanted to make sure that the points were determined based on the amount of effort (physical, monetary, emotional) was required for the task. I had to decide about how long each item would take, how much money it might cost, and overall how much effort was involved. I decided point values would only be 1-5 points per item, you could easily increase this if you feel items require a lot more effort than others. I figured if the act of service took more than 10 minutes it would be worth the max 5 points. If it was quick and required about 2 minutes or less, I gave the item a value of 1 point. My goal in assigning points was that someone couldn’t just spend $100 during the scavenger hunt and automatically win. Instead I wanted to make sure that someone who didn’t want to spend any money had just as good of chance to win as someone else. Your thoughts for valuing the tasks might be totally different. Deciding how many times a task could be completed Some of the tasks on the list were great items for each team to complete more than one time. So I had to decide how many times each task could be completed to try and keep the scavenger hunt fair for a family team and a youth team. I felt like items that involved social media or a cell phone needed to be limited to twice per team. Also, many of the items that required money I limited so that a team couldn’t do the same thing over and over again. The maximum number of times I allowed any item to be completed was 4. The Big Night When the night of the service scavenger hunt arrived, we set up a few tables outside with big signs letting people know where to pick up their lists. People started coming about 15 minutes early and the excitement of all the participants was contagious! Everyone was so excited to be involved in doing good while having a good time with their friends and family! I had some great family members that were willing to help pass out the scavenger hunt list to everyone and answer any questions. By about 6:15 everyone had received their lists and were on their way. When everyone returned at 7:30 things were crazy! I stood by the door and gathered everyone’s lists from them and wrote the time they returned on their sheet in case of a tie The feedback I received from nearly every person that returned was the best part. The smiles on people’s faces was so refreshing and their stories about seeing other people doing service items while out on the scavenger hunt was so fun! I was asked so many times if this was going to be an annual thing, and I was so excited to say YES! I will definitely be doing this again! I decided to have one winner, the team with the most points and then all of the participants were in a drawing for other prizes that were donated from our sponsors. There were about 50 teams and 300 individuals that attended. With this many people, there was so much good that was accomplished in such a short amount of time. **My instant download, editable list can be found here! If you have any questions, please reach out! If you coordinate a service scavenger hunt, upload pictures on our Facebook page HERE or email them so that we can see all of the good accomplished!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |