Corporate Team Building Activity: SMS Scavenger Hunt

With weather as nice as we have been having lately, there is no better time to have a team building or corporate scavenger hunt at your company! Instead of being confined within your office building, why not have the hunt occur out on the streets/within the city (if your location permits). A text scavenger hunt allows for people in your department to enjoy some fresh air, have a nice change of scenery, and have a fun day out with their team!

Now, when you first bring up “scavenger hunt” with your department, they may be a bit hesitant or unsure of how they feel about it – they may feel like it is childish, or would rather not participate in such events.  But I can guarantee you that once they get into the hunt, and become slightly more competitive by wanting to beat their fellow colleagues to win the hunt, they will be sure to have blast by the end of it all! Our website, TextClues, makes it super easy to create a scavenger hunt because you do not need to leave a paper trail of clues around the building or city (wherever the hunt is taking place) instead we let you send text messages to each team’s cell phone for the hunt, so the setup is quick and easy!

How should you set this all up?

  • Begin with finding out how many participants will be available to participate in your event (block off time in your teams calendar for a good two hours so that the team will have to join in on the team building experience!).  Once, you know the number of people, you can split off each team into smaller groups of 4 – 5 (or they can be larger or smaller depending on the number of people you are working with).
  • Determine the end location of your hunt
  • Where you want the hunt to take place? In your building, on your floor, or out on the streets
  • Think of whether you want to include any props within your hunt: e.g.: camera for your team to take photos during the hunt

Let’s give an example of how the hunt can work:

Clue: What year was the company founded? Hint: you may find this on a plaque on the outside of our building – respond with the answer

Answer: 2005

Clue: Great job! Now, go to our favorite coffee shop that we order coffee from for team meetings and take a team photo with the server. Reply with “done” when complete.

Answer: Done

Clue: Perfect. Head on over to the building where most of our town hall meetings take place and respond with the animal that appears outside the door.

Answer: Bull

Clue: Great! Now go on inside the building and find the stationary store. Purchase the cheapest possible item you can inside the store and respond with “done” when complete.

Answer: Done

Clue: Head back to the Thursday night pub that is a favorite of our department. First one back wins the prize, and gets first dibs on the appetizers! :)

 

Team building activities are an important part of any organization:

  • They help your department members get to know each other and have a fun time outside of a work setting to ensure morale is kept up
  • They let the department reward the time and effort the team puts into working with the company, and that you want to show them how much you appreciate their hard work

Scavenger hunts are the perfect team building exercise because it allows individuals within a team to work together to find out the answer to the next clue and build some overall team spirit. Use TextClues for your next scavenger hunt, and we can guarantee you that this will make scavenger hunts such a breeze for your company, and enjoyable for the employees, that you will be coming back each year for more!

Scavenger Hunt Ideas

I am going to take the opportunity in this post to describe the various ways that scavenger hunts can be used to make an event more fun and enjoyable for everyone.  Subsequent posts will dive further into each of the scavenger hunt opportunities and provide you with specific examples on how they would be run :) For now, we’ll just skim the surface of each one…

 

Kid’s Birthday Party Ideas:
kid's scavenger huntIt’s your turn to host a kid’s birthday party.  The difficulty in this is normally:
a) keeping all of the kids entertained and
b) keeping all of the kids entertained :)
What do kids love? Prizes and winning things! By hosting a scavenger hunt for kids in either your basement, family home, or wherever the birthday party is taking place, you can ensure that the kids are entertained for the duration of the hunt, and be happy in the end by receiving a prize for themselves.  The best way to make this work, if there is a large group of kids, is to divide the kids in groups of 2 – 3.  Each group would be running the same type of scavenger hunt, with the same types of clues as the other groups, however in a different order.  This way – you won’t have kids running into one another while the hunt is in play and also, this minimises the number of hunts you would need to put together yourself. And of course, the end of the hunt will lead each kid to a prize they will enjoy winning.

 

Team Building Exercise:
Ahh… now team building exercises for the workplace don’t always have to be the same type of activities that you don’t enjoy participating in.  By creating a scavenger hunt for your company’s department group, this will allow individuals to:team building scavenger hunt
a) Put on their thinking caps to determine where to go for the next clues
b) Enjoy and have fun out of a workplace event
c) And most importantly… work amongst a team in a collaborative way and get to know some individuals within the company that much better! :)
The scavenger hunt can take place within the company compounds, within walking distance of the company, or a combination of both.  Depending on the size of the group, groups of 3 or 4 are most ideal.  At the end, the winning team to arrive at the last clue first can be eligible to win a small gift card like a $5 or $10 gift card.

 

Birthday or Anniversary gifts:
romantic scavenger huntI know we already discussed a valentine’s day hunt in our previous post, but the same concept can be done for other special occasions for your significant other (or even for your friend’s!!) for birthdays or anniversaries.  Having the clues relate specifically to the person will make the hunt all the more sweeter for them and for the hunt to lead to a gift will make this day all the more special for them and a day for them to always remember…  Check out the Valentine’s Day Scavenger Hunt Ideas post for more information and an example hunt of how you can set one of these up for that special someone :)

 

Easter Hunt:
With Easter approaching, the hunt for those chocolate eggs and bunnies doesn’t heaster scavenger huntave to be completely a blind hunt!  By using a scavenger hunt tool like www.textclues.com, the hidden goods can be systematically placed in specific areas of where the hunt is taking place.  Once the correct answer to a clue has been found/answered, it can lead the hunter to some of the delicious goods… or you can make them antsy by making the goods only appear after certain clues so they will never know when to expect a prize! ;)  By doing it this way, also, you won’t end up finding chocolate from last year hidden away under your furniture again…

 

We’re going to stop here for now but next post we’ll talk about a few more scavenger hunt ideas (On-Campus hunts for pub crawls or school tours, teenage or adult parties, retreats/church youth group activities, and even for educational purposes!) before getting into more detail about them all. Stay tuned! :)