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If there is anyone who wishes to hear about how my first pre-karaoke trivia show went, PM me. I believe this is going to be a very, very viable selling point to a karaoke show. If there are enough people interested, I'll put a full description on here for everyone to peruse. I'm always looking for ways to upsell karaoke, and even though this is not karaoke, I think it will work well in being a draw to a place that may not otherwise have growing attendance.

I would be interested in hearing how you did it. I might have an opportunity for trivia myself.

I'm all ears. I'll take 'roke trivia for 200 Alex... I mean Karen!

After going to some shows I came up with a format that I think is going to work very well in our venue. I don't know how other areas in the country perceive trivia nights but in this area they're very big and draw good crowds. One of the comments I received last night from several participants was the fact that they loved the variety of subjects - very important.

I spent about 3 weeks gathering trivia from various sources - anytime I heard an interesting factoid, i'd jot it down. Because I didn't want to just draw karaoke people but a crowd in general, I spent a good amount of time mixing it up - making sure no particular subject (like television shows) comprised too many of the questions. To draw a diverse crowd and allow all participants to really feel 'smart' you have to consider this. Rolling Stone mag is a great source; of course all the news shows for current events (Frontline, NPR, Meet the Press, NY Times, etc., etc.). Reviews for movies and theaters provide a lot of opportunities for trivia.

So after I compiled all the questions, I divided the questions into three different lots of 10 questions and created a "musicians name scramble" for the fourth round. I used small 'order pads' similar to the ones waitresses use that are NCR 2 copy - I pulled off 2 at a time and stapled the top, and gave each team 3 sets of 2 pages. These order forms are numbered 1 through 15 so you could actually easily do 15 questions per round. They are inexpensive at Staples. I asked them to write their team name across the top so I could record their scores on the master sheet as this is an 8-week cumulative score quiz. When the round was done they were instructed to remove the top original copy and hand it in, and they could keep the carbon so at the end we could actually go through all the questions and they could see what they got right and what they got wrong. (This is very important to some people!).

As far as the presentation, I had been to shows where they only announced the questions over a PA. This creates difficulties for some people so I created a powerpoint presentation with all the questions on it, connected via an HDMI cable to the flat screen at the front of the room, and sat next to it with a mic. I advanced the presentation one screen at a time and read each question aloud. The questions remained on the screen until the next question, allowing people who don't hear so well an opportunity to actually view the question. The first slide was a title screen - Welcome to XXXX Week One Trivia Night. Then the following 10 slides were the first 10 questions. The 11th slide said "This is the end of round one. Please bring the original copy of your answers to me. Make sure your team name is on it. You have approximately 5 minutes until Round Two." That stayed on the screen and I may actually embed a live counter on it so people can see how much time they have remaining before the next round.

Round two was multiple choice questions - a lot of them silly but apparently very confusing to people because many didn't score very well. I didn't think the questions were particularly difficult but apparently they were. I went through the next 10 slides, the 11th side said, "We have reached the end of round two...blah, blah,blah... The next round consists of a scramble/jumble. I will hand out the sheets and you can begin working on it at any time. You will have 15 minutes to complete this section of the quiz." I did a pretty good job on those, I guess, too because the musicians were very popular and many only scored 4-5 out of 10. Example: Gonfriere - Foreigner.

I collected those and scored them, and started round four which was general questions, again in the 10-slide group. Each group handed in their answers and I scored them all, and announced the top 3 teams, who each got cash prizes (covering their tab for a certain amount).

The fact that this type of thing can be created in powerpoint and pretty quickly, and makes for a really nice looking presetantion, makes this an easy activity for the tester. It's nice to have someone who can score the sheets as they come in. It's important to have a very good and well laid out answer sheet to allow for quick scoring. It's good to go over all the answers at the end for those who are interested.

One of the great things about this is it gets everyone involved if they wish to be involved. You can stress the fact that they don't even need to be "competing' but just do it for fun - 3 of the 6 teams last night did just that - nothing serious, just something to do. I think everytime you offer people something to do that keeps them involved, they're likely to buy more - another drink or maybe an appetizer, or whatever. The goal is, of course, to increase the venue's bottom line and we did that substantially last night.

I will spend a few minutes each day this week building next week's quiz - I have a ton of questions left over from last week. It will not take long to create the shows each week, I will have a copy on my computer, and will probably consider presenting this to places who are struggling as an option to increase their bottom line. Some places it will never work in but I think people may be surprised as to how much a lot of people enjoy it a lot. The key is to make everyone feel like they have something to offer as far as their knowledge, so keeping a good variety of subjects and a varying degree of difficulty is important.

I'd be happy to send a copy of my powerpoint of week one to anyone who is interested in seeing how simple it is.

I used to do something like that. It got very positive results. I wrote a computer based game called J-Trivia (a shameless Jeopardy rip-off) and we had a lot of fun with that. It was a good selling point for new venues. Unfortunately the software was about as popular as death but I still think it's a good idea. Good luck with it.

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Okay, who took my pants?

This sounds really neat and I think it might generate some business but it seems similar to NTN (National Trivia Network) which is in most every major bar and restaurant in Florida. I'm sure you've heard of it. Obviously your version is more intimate and you do offer cash prizes and it involves only the folks at your particular establishment.
I would like to thank you for sharing this and wish you much success with it in the future.

They previously had NTN in this place but pulled it. It'll be fun for a while ... until it starts interfering with football, etc. Another great benefit is I'm gettin' a whole lot smarter....

I run 2 quiz-shows a week. One draws about 30 people, just regulars and quite competitive. The other I inherrited: drawing 20 to start with, now up to about 80 - less competitive and a lot more fun.

So, how to run it depends on the crowd. If they want it to be competitive - then run it quite strictly and charge per person/team. If they want fun, run it for free and allow heckling and so on - really get into it.

The strict one I do is very quiet, people hush for the questions, and people who are noisy seem to get frowned upon. You have to have rules because people complain ("There's 5 people in that team", "They looked at their phone", etc). We play for drinks prizes - and then a "higher or lower" on the cards, winner first, then 2nd team, etc.

The fun one - oh this can often be the highlight of my week, I adore it...

No team sizes, no major rules, noisy as you wanna be. I have a laugh, they heckle me, I send myself up a little. We all adore it. Prizes are drinks vouchers to be used in the next quiz. We also sell tickets for a raffle-style draw. 3 winners drawn out will get a go on the "higher or lower" - winning whatever is in the pot (£170 last week).

Questions:

I always start with a pictures round, as you can give these out beforehand and allow people to mull over them. I have done pic rounds such as:
* Name the celeb
* Spot the difference (photoshopped a local scene)
* Famous cars from films
* Album covers with wording removed
* Movie posters with wording removed
* Movie scenes
* Flags
* Country outlines
* Brand logos

All sorts (and if anyone wants, I can zip them up and upload).

Other rounds...

I always include a round on the weeks news. I also always take this from the same source to ensure the same range of questions.

There is always an "intro's" round (intro from a song, name the track/artist).

HAS to be a sports round - people love sports.

Final round is always general trivia (www.quiz-zone.co.uk is good).

I then do random rounds such as:

* Covers (play a cover, who recorded the original)
* TV & film themes
* Adverts (videos from you-tube editted so they have to guess the brand)
* Movie quotes
* Lysircs
* Movie taglines
* Which film is this character from
* Acronyms
* Geography
* History

Heck I even did a maths round once - no calculators

The feedback I get is amazing - people follow me more than they do as a DJ or KJ. Everyone feels involved - takes a few weeks, but you read the room and know how to pitch the questions based upon age, background, etc.

I adore the quizzes

A few words of warning:
* Do not use quiz books. I bought 3, and all 3 had some wrong answers.
* Do not let people question your answers during the quiz. Make a note of them after and get verify it for next week.
* Keep the wording of questions simple.
* Repeat each question at least once.

Any help you want or anything just shout as I love my quizzes

Karen, This sounds fantastic - you've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about it and then doing it.

I was interested to hear about your use of the big screen as an enhancement cos I've only just myself got into using the screen for background annoucements etc inbetween karaoke songs.

Many thanks at this point to LONMAN who pointed me in the right direction !

I too have been thinking for a while now about how to involve more people in the evenings entertainment - not just the singers.

On quiet nights I've tried playing snippets of obscure songs and asking for artist, composers etc but I've not developed it further.

Your comments and those of NLOUCH have given me great ideas to try and get extra nights from my regular venue.

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[font=Fantasy][/font] "Travellin' at the speed of light"

I have never seen a quiz night fail. They may take some time to build up, and they take a fair bit of promoting - but eventually, they pay off.

The tactic we used was this:

1st place: £15 drinks voucher
2nd place: £10 drinks voucher
3rd place: £05 drinks voucher

Each voucher was for use on ANY OTHER SUNDAY (Sunday being the quiz night) and so they pretty much guarantee return trade.

As for using a screen - in my quiz it's a must. We have old adverts, movie trailers, music videos - it's really multimedia. And people love it, the old adverts are hilarious - had the whole room singing along to that Kia-Ora advert...

Fantastic.

Where did you get the old ads from ?

Technology has moved on a pace somewhat since the days when we had a pub and were running quizzes etc.

Top prize was a "gallon of beer" then to make it simple we gave £10 worth of vouchers to cover it (you can tell how long ago that was when £10 would buy a gallon of beer)

At that time the only "visuals" were photo copied sheets.

Thanks for the info anyhow

Great ideas

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[font=Fantasy][/font] "Travellin' at the speed of light"

YouTube. Get a YouTube downloader and it will save them as .avi which you can then easily edit in Windows Movie Maker

I try to keep it "simple" for the players, but tecchie for me, cos I love multimedia.

My quiz is run from a powerpoint template I built, and has served me well for 2 years so far

Nlouch - I totally agree - this is going to be a great fun time. Funny thing is, I enjoy putting it together as much as the participants enjoy doing it. Ours tends to be more on the fun side at this point - but I have a feeling as we progress it may get more and more competitive. The ideas for questions seems endless at this point. Thanks for your ideas - I can see implementing some of those into our show.

The comment I received from regular quiz goers was that I had a great variety and that the difficulty level was very good - in fact, the highest scoring team scored 25 out of possible 40 so he is probably right. Now I have to focus on maintaining that sort of level.

Funny thing is, all the English pubs in this area (there are quite a number of them in Seattle) do trivia nights and they don't advertise - it is all word of mouth and all are crazy busy on their trivia nights.

Thanks for the youtube idea ... I'll have to work on getting familiar with that and use that as well. (I'm really NOT techie at all.)

I only have 1-1/2 hours to do the show and the other night I had to wait for a game to get over so we started a little late but managed to squeeze everything in.

I haven't read every post up until this point, but let me provide what maybe a different perspective from any other post.

I like trivia as much, if not more, than most. I used to be hooked on NTN and preferred to go to establishments that offered it. Although I never really played it at home, on-line. It was particularly enjoyable while we out to dinner and my daughter wanted me to join her efforts in playing the game.

Once in awhile, I have experienced karaoke shows where trivia questions would pop up, occasionally. Also, in the bars around here, there could be an interruption for raffling off lingerie. And while I also might have to tolerate filler music and/or dance music during a karaoke show, what gives with the interruption for trivia?

If you want to have trivia before karaoke? Great!
You want to have trivia after karaoke? Great!
You just want to have a night of trivia? Great!

So, again, I wonder out loud, "what does trivia have to do with karaoke?"

Doesn't have much to do at all with karaoke, Ericlater. Since a lot of establishments seem to be suffering from any number of issues right now (no smoking, economy), etc., I only proposed trivia as an opportunity to provide another service.

We've had our karaoke biz for 12 years...we've been as busy as we want to be. It'd be hard not to recognize that there are a lot of small and large places hovering on the edge of failure.

I was approached by a manager who is always looking for ways to improve the business he is responsible for. Since trivia is a very popular activity in this area (NTN included), and since we have a PA system and are acquainted with many of the patrons in his location, when he was considering trivia nights as an adjunct to everything else they do he asked if we would be interested in creating and running the show there. This is in the time period directly before our show.

Since the general overall financial healthiness of a venue carries over to all other forms of entertainment, I saw it as an opportunity to increase our value to the place.

I, like you, would never appreciate trivia happening in the middle of a karaoke show but this new event has brought in people who probably never would have even bothered going to a bar. Again, my reason for mentioning it is the fact that since a lot of us karaoke hosting companies are already "out there in public" that it might be something others might want to offer - you know, as an upsell.

We do games and drawings all the time that have nothing to do with karaoke. Used to do hula hoop contests, had bingo games, trivia, wind up toy races, RC car races, walla balla contest, golf games, dart games, a form of Lets Make A Deal, and several other types of little games. Never once did we hear any complaints. The most anything took up time wise was a few minutes - maybe 5 max. Asking a trivia question takes no more time then asking the question in between a singer like you were making a bar announcement.
Games can sometimes break up a normal or mundane routine & get others in the bar that don't sing involved as well!

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Karen

Gotcha... guess my bad, perhaps, for not reading entire thread? Sure, trivia maybe great as an adjunct business for KJ/DJ's since we already have the equipment.