20 Fun Virtual Event Ideas for Your Team and Clients

Do you work with a remote team? Are your clients in a different time zone? You can still give them the chance to have fun, learn new skills, and build lasting relationships – by making virtual events a regular feature of how they interact with each other.

We’ve compiled a sweeping list of fun virtual event ideas, so start exploring which ones your clients, prospects, and in-house teams will love most.

6 fun virtual event ideas for your team

Great communication and trust is vital for effective teamwork – here are some virtual events that will get your teams interacting and developing strong working relationships.

Scavenger hunt

Your remote teams may be miles away from each other in reality, but virtually they can be side-by-side, problem-solving, having fun, and bonding together during a virtual scavenger hunt, where teams solve riddles and complete other challenges against the clock and each other.

Scavenger hunts require a lot of planning and organization, but they’re a fantastic way to foster team spirit and develop everybody’s communication skills over the course of an hour or two.

Coffee breaks

Unlike scavenger hunts, virtual coffee breaks are super-simple to organize – you can make them part of your team’s weekly routine.

Regular coffee breaks can be set up with different breakout rooms for members of your team who work every day together but rarely have the opportunity to enjoy each other’s company socially.

And by giving pairs or small groups the chance to chat in a breakout room, you can help remove some of the awkwardness that people experience when trying to be social in larger groups, like during a team meeting.

Happy hour

Perfect for the last Friday of the month, happy hours are a fantastic way to close out a period of hard work with some shared downtime. Encourage everyone to bring along a drink – it doesn’t have to be alcoholic, of course – and enjoy chewing the fat for an hour.

If you think there could be a few too many awkward silences, why don’t you create a list of light-hearted questions as an icebreaker to help keep the conversation flowing? You can ask about people’s favorite movies, their number one dish to cook up, or where they’d most like to travel.

Hackathon

If you work with software engineers and developers, a hackathon can be an incredible way to put people’s skills to the test during a fun, competitive event that can also be surprisingly productive and influential.

Hackathons normally take place over the course of an entire day or even a weekend – but you can also have them over the course of a month, with a weekly session for each team to regroup and work on the project.

That's what we did at Livestorm: an internal hackathon to develop plugins. The results were outstanding and most of the plugins will be listed publicly soon on our marketplace.

Yoga

Yoga sessions can provide superb value for mental and physical health, even to the uninitiated. A great way to break up a busy week, find a time slot that your team can agree on, and then take part in an instructor-led yoga half-hour that will re-energize the group.

Meditation

If yoga works to break the week up, why not start it off stress-free with a 5-minute group meditation together? Instead of beginning the week with all the tension that often comes with a Monday morning, kick things off with some togetherness and calmness.

5 fun virtual event ideas for your clients

If you want to foster meaningful relationships with your clients while also strengthening your brand, try out these online event ideas.

Speed networking

Speed networking is a fun, fast, and effective way for your business associates to get to know each other, share their details, and hopefully start off a lasting connection and relationship. Also, it’s a great way for large organizations to have their disparate teams meet and bond, which is brilliant for cross-departmental communication.

You can help participants keep the conversation going by giving them icebreaker questions, like: What was your worst interview? What app do you use most during work? What’s your dream job?

Dinner party

Another really fun way for teams, clients, and partners to mix together is with an online dinner party.

It’s important to have the buy-in of all the participants – no one likes to be forced into a social occasion of any kind – but as long as all parties are enthusiastic to take part, virtual dinner parties are often a huge success.

Plan it carefully so everyone knows to have a nice meal prepared (no junk food allowed), then let the wine and conversation flow (why not use a service like Hoppier to gift the goodies?).

Fireside chat with an industry expert

The key to a successful fireside chat is a true expert guest people can learn from (ideally an experienced, engaging speaker), a well-prepared moderator, and a relaxing setting for in-depth conversation and candid responses.

With question upvotes, you can involve all the attendees, and be sure of avenues of discussion that everyone finds relevant.

Wine club

You might not think a wine club could work remotely, but actually they’re fun, engaging evenings where clients and partners learn, socialize, and get to know each other.

Hire an expert to curate a wine list and organize delivery, and make sure attendees are prepared with quality wine glasses and corkscrews. Then have your expert guide everyone through the tasting process.

Fundraising

Virtual fundraising events can come in many different forms, but they don’t have to be enormous, complex events to be a success. For example, online auctions, tours, and comedy are all examples of fundraising events you can organize via a third party.

4 fun virtual event ideas for professional training

Investing in professional growth opportunities is one of the most important ways you can impact your team’s output – see which of these virtual events could help get even more out of your online training.

Quizzes

A great way to review topics is with an informal quiz – and an effective way to both engage trainees and reinforce subjects you’ve touched on is with multimedia questions. These can be in the form of audios, videos, slides, or PDFs.

You’ll soon find that, with multimedia sharing, quizzes are huge fun – and a fantastic studying aid.

Typing speed race

Typing races are super fun, and they can be as big or as small as you want. Just be careful – you’ll be surprised how competitive otherwise mild-mannered team members suddenly become when given some text, a clock, and a similarly geek-minded colleague to race against.

Virtual tours

From world-famous museums and stately homes to national parks, zoos, and aquariums – wherever there’s an entrance fee and guide map, there’s also a virtual tour.

There are few better ways to delight and amaze people than with a virtual tour, and to make it extra special, let people choose for themselves which tour to enjoy with an exciting live poll within your video engagement platform.

Improv classes

Improvisation classes can be valuable exercises in building confidence, team bonding, and listening.

Many people who regularly attend improv describe feeling more energized and creative as a result of their classes. Also, with the sense of risk that comes with performing scriptless, people often become far more willing to take on new challenges, such as learning new skills in the workplace.

5 fun virtual event ideas for your students

Here are some great ways to engage learners with your school and bring variety to your online courses.

Nutritionist session

Inviting a nutritionist to offer advice on healthy, sustainable eating and drinking habits often has huge appeal across all kinds of learners. As well as these events being constructive, informative sessions for attendees, they also give students the chance to bond through sharing their concerns, experiences, and insights.

End-of-year awards

Dressing up for the occasion, speeches, special guests, and then, of course, the accolades themselves – virtual end-of-year awards are a fantastic opportunity for instructors and learners to recognize each other's hard work and bask in a shower of reaction emojis.

Book readings

Where a book club involves choosing a book, going away, reading it, and reporting back, a book reading is a day-long event where various readers read through an entire book. Listeners can ‘drop in’ any time for five minutes, an hour, or more, and readers can grow their confidence as they engage with a subject-relevant text.

Online games

There are countless games that work brilliantly online, like bingo, charades, Undercover, and Scattegory, which are all quick to organize and make for hours of fun.

Chess club

Classic board games are another opportunity for you to organize fun, inclusive virtual events that work brilliantly for learners, no matter where they’re from, how old they are, or what they do.

Chess clubs especially are fantastic for creating a sense of community among their members, with games that can last anything from a few minutes to days or weeks.

What tools do you need to run a fun virtual event?

The most important tool you can have for engaging virtual events is a versatile video conferencing platform that’s easy to use for both hosts and guests.

By choosing a platform that can support any use case, from small improvised team meetings to great virtual recruiting events and conferences, you’ll know you’ll never be limited in what you can organize.

And with the very best virtual event platforms, you’ll have not just incredible versatility, but also a wealth of engagement features, like question upvotes, live polls, reaction emojis, multimedia sharing, virtual whiteboards, and breakout rooms, as well as auto-generated landing pages for all your events.

For example, Livestorm is a video engagement platform that’s completely adaptable to any kind of virtual event. And with Livestorm plugins, developers can even build their own customized features to create exactly the in-room experience they want.

Make virtual fun a regular event

With versatile video conferencing software in place, there’s no limit to what fun virtual events you can create for your teams, clients, partners, and learners. Brilliant for engaging people in new topics, developing skills, team-building, celebrating, and more, virtual events should be a regular feature of your calendar year.

Frequently asked questions about fun virtual event ideas

How do you make a virtual event engaging?

Make your virtual event engaging by involving attendees throughout the process, using fun engagement tools, such as live polls, reaction emojis, digital whiteboards, and multimedia sharing.

What do I need for a fun virtual event?

The most important tool for a fun virtual event is a highly versatile video engagement platform Livestorm, which you can use to support any kind of virtual event from quizzes and classes to workshops and wine clubs.

Should you provide food and drink at a virtual event?

Whether you provide food and drink at a virtual event really depends on the kind of event you’re hosting. However, if you invite clients and professional partners to an event, the provision of food and drink is always very well received.

How can I get people to attend my virtual event?

You can promote your virtual event in a variety of ways, but often the most cost-effective way to do so is by tapping into your mailing list. Also, why not join Facebook and LinkedIn groups and communities where you know you’ll find people who are interested in the kind of event you’re planning?