Bringing new customers into a restaurant or bar can be a fantastic way to increase your profit margins — and a theme night such as a trivia event can be an ideal way to do this. If you want to learn more about how to host a trivia night, you’ve come to the right place.
Bar trivia nights and pub quizzes have always been popular. During the pandemic, people were even doing virtual trivia nights via Zoom to stay in touch with friends and bring the fun of a trivia game into their homes. From NYC to the San Francisco Bay area, trivia nights remain a prevalent theme night in city-center Irish pubs and sports bars.
So, whether you run a restaurant, craft beer taproom, Irish pub, or sports bar, a game night could be an excellent way to attract new customers. Here’s a step-by-step guide to hosting a successful trivia night, with handy tips to teach you everything you need to know.
Like running a private event for a select few diners, hosting a team trivia night has various benefits.
More customers: A quiz night or game night can appeal to new customers who want to test their smarts, meaning you’ll have a broader customer base.
Increased sales: By bringing more customers into your business on a particular night, you can expect more sales than usual, which could boost your profits.
Marketing opportunities: Becoming a trivia restaurant can provide excellent opportunities to market other theme nights, advertise special offers, or get people to write reviews for your business.
Corporate social responsibility: If you decide to host a trivia night fundraiser, you can do a good deed for your local community and reap the benefits of the CSR business model.
Before planning your trivia night, you’ll need to ensure you have the right equipment. Ensure you have everything you need ahead of your first quiz by preparing the following:
Pen and paper
Answer sheets
A score sheet for the quiz master
A question sheet or PowerPoint presentation with the questions written clearly for your guests to read
Now you know why trivia night bars can be so successful. You’re probably wondering how to host a trivia night in your own food or drink establishment. Here’s how you can do it in eight easy steps.
A successful trivia night can attract more customers, but choosing the best day of the week for your pub quiz is essential. In all likelihood, you already have enough customers coming into your business on a Friday and Saturday night. Running theme nights during the rest of the week can encourage more people to come in on days that are usually less busy.
If you follow this schedule, you could maximize the number of customers coming in every night of the week:
Monday night: Quiz night
Tuesday night: Extended happy hour, with deals on food and drink
Wednesday night: Live music or a DJ
Thursday night: Karaoke night
If you only want to run a trivia night, that’s fine too. Choose one night of the week that’s usually quiet, and make that your weekly pub quiz night.
Trivia nights can be busy, so it’s worth considering what food you’ll serve ahead of time — it might make more sense to run a reduced menu or offer food that’s easy to eat and quick to serve, like tacos or burgers. Customers can eat food like this easily while still engaging in the game.
When starting your trivia night, offering drink specials might also make sense to get people in. Pitchers of beer for a reduced price or two-for-one cocktails could be the boost your customers need to get them in for the first quiz night. What’s more, ordering drinks in bigger batches means customers will need to place fewer orders overall, which won’t interrupt the momentum of the quiz.
The next stage should be organizing your staff before the pub trivia event. Ask your general manager to act as an organizer for staff. You might need to bring in more bartenders or servers than usual.
You’ll also need to hire or ask someone in your existing team to act as quizmaster — you can’t have a trivia night without a trivia host.
You also need to produce good questions to entertain your guests. Aim to get a mix to appeal to as many people as possible without making it too specific or broad. A question about Harry Potter is OK, but a whole quiz about it will only attract Harry Potter fans and likely be less popular. Once you’ve set up a successful quiz night, you can consider theme quizzes for specific topics.
To start with, go for a mix of general knowledge, pop culture, sports, and American history. You could also organize a music or picture round to keep things interesting.
Search online or look at board games like Trivial Pursuit for question inspiration. You could also watch a couple of trivia TV shows like Jeopardy or The Chase.
The best trivia nights also have fantastic prizes. It’s a great way to entice customers when starting up.
Offer a gift card with money to spend in your restaurant or bar for first place. You could also give a free appetizer or round of drinks for a winning team name.
Once your trivia night gets popular enough, you could even ask other local businesses to donate prizes.
Your bar or restaurant must be set out well for a quiz. You might need to move tables around to create a more open seating plan — ideally, guests at every table will be able to see the host or quiz master.
You’ll also want to create enough space for all contestants to move through the seating area when they need to go to the bar or bathroom.
To ease stress on your front-of-house team, consider setting up self-service. Self-ordering systems like KioskBuddy can make trivia nights much easier for your staff. KioskBuddy lets customers keep an open tab and add to their order throughout the event — they just pay at the end. This is a fantastic way to encourage customers to order another round.
KioskBuddy also lets customers split payments so that each trivia player can pay for their food and drinks.
Systems like this make it easier for customers and leave staffers free to focus on making drinks and serving food.
The next step in starting a trivia night should be to establish a set of rules. Decide how many questions you’ll have in each trivia round and how many team members will be allowed in each trivia team.
You should also decide what to do in the event of a tied score — always write a tie-breaker question if you want to avoid giving out double prizes!
The final stage in starting a quiz night is ensuring customers come in. Market your event beforehand so your guests know what’s happening and when.
If you have a good social media following, you can use it to spread the word. Creating a Facebook event for your trivia night lets customers RSVP ahead of time, which can be helpful — you’ll have an idea of roughly how many guests to expect and can prepare accordingly.
Restaurants and bars nationwide, from New York to San Francisco, can benefit from hosting trivia nights. They can be a great way to attract more customers and enjoy a busy night when it might traditionally be slow. Learning how to host a trivia night can feel overwhelming, but you can start your own trivia night bar with the proper knowledge and tools.
KioskBuddy makes it easy to set up self-ordering for your quiz night. Customers can place and pay for orders themselves, leaving your staffers free to focus on making drinks, serving food, and running the quiz. Customers can leave their tabs open to order additional food and drink throughout the evening, and the split payments feature makes it easy to divide the bill between team members.
Sign up for KioskBuddy now and enjoy a 30-day free trial.