I’m not a programming librarian by trade, but at my last job, I got to help run our library’s monthly Trivia Night for over five years. As a certified Trivia Nerd, this was one of the most entertaining things I’ve been able to do in my career, and our patrons enjoyed it even more than we did! Our program was so popular that online registration would sometimes fill up in less than 60 seconds.
We hosted trivia once a month for 6-9 months out of the year, but rather than hosting it at the library, we partnered with a local brewery, which gave us a bigger space and a great community partnership. Meanwhile, the brewery enjoyed an evening of very solid profits. They even created a signature beer for the library each fall (complete with a punny name) and donated a portion of the proceeds to us!
On its face, running a trivia event seems pretty straightforward, but our version had a couple elements that really set us apart from the other local trivia night offerings: we were able to use these events to foster strong relationships with our attendees, and we leaned into our personalities and senses of humor to make the program unique.
Are you thinking about organizing a trivia program at your library? Here are some tips and tricks that helped make our program successful:
Find the Right Program Length
You really have to find that sweet spot when it comes to structuring your trivia program. Too few rounds feel unsatisfying, whereas too many rounds become a burden. Our trivia nights ran for two hours, and we had six “traditional” rounds of 10 questions each, plus a picture round that teams could work on throughout the evening. We experimented with other options, but this setup worked well for staff and patrons alike.
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Set Ground Rules Early
It’s no secret that trivia events can get super competitive, especially if you’re holding them at a place that serves alcohol. A healthy sense of competition makes for a fun and engaging time, but too much competition can make it hard to keep the program on track. Some of our helpful ground rules included “Limit the trash-talking,” “Send a representative of your group to talk to a staff member if you have concerns about an answer,” and “Don’t holler or charge at the person reading the questions.” (Yeah, we came up with that rule after a memorably boisterous evening.)
Feature a Wide Variety of Topics
Unless you’re creating a program with a very specific theme like “Marvel Comics,” or “’80’s Movies,” you’ll want to incorporate multiple topics to make sure there’s something for everyone. Here are a few strategies that we found helpful:
- Get creative! For example, we learned that we didn’t have a ton of sports buffs amongst our trivia regulars, so some of the sports-themed topics we used were “Superstitions in Sports” and “March Madness,” where the twist was that all of the questions were about basketball players, but had nothing to do with their actual athletic performances.
- Incorporate your personalities. One of my favorite Name That Tune rounds consisted of songs from each staff member’s personal Spotify Top 10 lists, and for fun, we let the groups guess which song came from which staff member’s list.
- Get your patrons in on the fun. We encouraged every team to submit ideas for future categories because it helped us during our planning meetings, and it was hilarious seeing some of the suggestions. We also got a lot of suggestions that would be really difficult to turn into a full 10 question round (think “Stock Symbols” or “Things Only Scottish People Would Know”), so we collected these ideas and created a recurring theme called “Guys, We Can’t Do An Entire Round on This,” where every question in the round had a different topic.
Write Strong Questions
One of the things that made our trivia nights so special was that we wrote almost all of our own questions. Yeah, it was a lot of extra work, but it was a ton of fun, and it really separated our program from your average bar trivia. Here are some of our best question-writing tips, if you want to go the extra mile with your program:
- Include a mix of easy, medium, and hard questions for each round. And when in doubt, err on the easier side of the spectrum.
- Include context clues in the question so that people have a chance at guessing the correct answer, even if they don’t know the answer outright. For example, “Which classic children’s author was a youth librarian before publishing her first book?” requires you to have this knowledge outright, while “This classic children’s author was a youth librarian before publishing her first book, Henry Huggins, in 1950.” gives you a chance at answering the book if you know who wrote Henry Huggins. (Answer: Beverly Cleary.)
- Our patrons loved bonus points! See if you can find opportunities to help them boost their scores. (Example: “Nirvana released three studio albums before the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994. Name one of the albums, and for a bonus point, name all three.” Answer: Bleach, Nevermind, In Utero)
- Avoid questions where the answer is a specific number or date. If you do write a question like this, allow correct answers within a specific range. [Example: “What year did James Patterson publish Along Came a Spider, the first book in the Alex Cross series? Answers within five years will be accepted.” Answer: 1993 (1988 – 1998)]
I knew our program was special the first time I attended trivia and our patrons applauded as soon as we walked into the brewery. If you have the staff and the time to devote to a program like this, I think you’ll find lots of opportunities for meaningful patron and community connections, and a ton of fun along the way! (And if you need an extra for your trivia team, hit me up!)
The following comes to you from the Editorial Desk.
This week, we’re highlighting a post that had our Managing Editor Vanessa Diaz feeling a type of way. Now, even five years after it was published, Vanessa is still salty about American Dirt. Read on for an excerpt and become an All Access member to unlock the full post.
Picture it: The United States, January 2020. A book with a pretty blue and white cover is making the rounds on the bookish internet. The blue ink forms a beautiful hummingbird motif against a creamy background, a bird associated with the sun god Huitzilopochtli in Aztec mythology. Black barbed wire, at once delicate and menacing, cuts the pattern into a grid resembling an arrangement of Talavera tiles. The package is eye-catching, ostensibly Mexican in feel, and evocative of borders and the migrant experience.
The book tells the story of a bookstore owner in Acapulco, Mexico, who is forced to flee her home when a drug cartel murders everyone in her family except for her young son at a quinceañera. She and the boy are forced to become migrants and embark on a treacherous journey north to the U.S. border, evading the cartel and befriending fellow migrants along the way. The book is being lauded not just as the “it” book of the season but as the immigration story. It gets the Oprah treatment and is praised by everyone from Salma Hayek to the great Sandra Cisneros, who called it “the great novel of Las Américas.”
It’s been over five years, and this book is still the bane of my existence.
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