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Disclaimer: I purchased a new microphone and am learning how to use it. You can expect the quality of these recordings to (hopefully) improve as I learn more.
I started writing monthly trivia for a small business’ blog in my hometown of Pittsburgh seven years ago. I had never written trivia and, it took a few months for me to get it right. Initial engagement with the posts was low, and the trivia I put out was boring!
One month I happened to run Pittsburgh-focused trivia, and engagement shot up over 150%. When the owners saw the uptick in engagement, they decided that my monthly trivia would be Pittsburgh centric. So, I have been writing Pittsburgh-centric trivia for over six years now, and engagement has grown year over year.
The owners sold their business in 2020, and the new owners wanted to keep my trivia alive because of the engagement it drives with their customers. People from Pittsburgh are proud of their city. The monthly opportunity to challenge and educate them on their city was a winning strategy for increasing newsletter open rates, clicks, and responses.
Now. Even though I write trivia every month as a freelancer, I haven’t been entirely successful applying this tactic to my day job as a community manager.
Our community and learning and growth team owns a license for Kahoot!. If you are unfamiliar with it, Kahoot! is a platform for trivia and quizzing. You build out the questions on an online portal. The person running the quiz facilitates it live, and through a simple URL and a code, players use their chosen device to play along.
Our team is working on our 2021 Roadshow presentation to highlight what our community has to offer our employees this year. So, we decided to integrate Kahoot!, into our 10-minute teaser presentations to see if it would drive more engagement.
We have tested Kahoot! twice now in a larger group setting (>100 attendees) by polling the audience on what they want out of their community experience. After looking at the post-presentation reports on the Kahoot! platform, we had 62% of attendees join the Kahoot!, which was impressive. However, only 10% of our attendees completed the eight questions, and around 42% didn’t answer any of the questions.
There is room for improvement, and we need to keep iterating.
Currently, the following questions are top of mind:
- How many of our members had issues with the Kahoot! interface?
- Were our polls too hard?
- Did we ask the wrong questions?
- Were the polls boring?
- Were the polls in the optimal place within the presentation?
- What else aren’t we asking ourselves?
The biggest win that came out of this test was that we had three people reach out to us for additional licenses to use Kahoot!, to drive engagement with their teams. Now we have a total of six teams who have licenses, and the usage is consistent.
However, we still have to crack the code for how our team should be using it.
Going back to my trivia work, I want to test Kahoot! with trivia to see if it drives more engagement. I will be running a trivia event next month for this purpose. It will be a 60-minute trivia session on Kahoot!, run by an outside facilitator, and I hope to piggyback on what works.
In addition to testing trivia, I want to give our members an additional chance to get used to the Kahoot! interface. Some of our folks took a while to adapt because it’s not 100% intuitive, which may be one of our blockers. Practice makes perfect!
If the trivia night results are positive, maybe peppering trivia alongside our live polling is the answer. Or maybe not! But either way, I would love to unlock the potential of this platform because any program we run that lifts engagement is a big win.
I am looking forward to seeing if Kahoot! can take us there.
