Small challenges for online audience engagement
How to create riddles and games to create engagement and excitement around your event — all you need is creativity and some free tickets to give away!
At TEDxTUM, we organize several events per year, including our main event with up to 600 attendees. One of our bigger marketing goals is to engage our audience in-between events. A considerable part of our attendees are students at the Technical University of Munich, and if students are known for one thing, it’s their weakness for getting free stuff. So why not use this to create engagement and excitement leading up to our event? We decided to raffle away free tickets to students each year, but make them work for the chance of winning one.
How does it work?
The approach is simple: during the 5 days before ticket sales start, we provide one small game or riddle per day on our web site. Every student that finds the solution can enter the raffle by sending the solution and a valid proof of matriculation to a specifically created email address. Solving multiple of these daily riddles creates additional raffle entries and thus increases the chances of winning a ticket, but one person can only win one (non-transferable) ticket.
Sounds easy? You have underestimated the TEDxTUM Brand & Creative team! This group of people is not only very creative in coming up with these riddles, but also has lots of fun watching people struggle with them.
For us, this method is much better than a “standard” ticket giveaway that works by signing up for a mailing list or sharing something on social media. These people have the feeling that they have done something, achieved something instead of just winning a ticket by chance. Ultimately, this also leads to a lower no-show rate for these free tickets.
Examples of past games and riddles
Below you find some of the past challenges to give you a head start and show you where you could go with such an approach. The solution usually has something to do with the event theme or one of its key topics. In the past, we came up with:
Audio challenges: We uploaded audio files that had to be manipulated (e.g. played in reverse or at a different speed) to reveal the solution. Just to illustrate a riddle, we pre-faced the audio challenge that involved reversing the track with the words “Sometimes we have to listen to ourselves. Sometimes we have to think outside of the box. Sometimes we have to think upside down.”
Coded messages: These involved cracking a code to reveal the solution, e.g. by translating the message from morse code. In another challenge, the solution was hidden behind a short poem and could be revealed by selecting the text with the mouse, hinted at by the words “mark your idea” (see below).
Real-life tasks: For instance, we gave people the coordinates of an iconic location on campus and asked them to send us a selfie from that location on the same day (playing on the assumption that students need a motivating reason to go to campus and attend classes).
Puzzles: Ah, the most frustrating type of riddle, because the solution is so simple but can be very hard to find! My favorite was the word search. The task seems straightforward: Find all the words hidden in the grid. Except when you did find them, nothing happened! I tried cracking this for over an hour, I tried everything (even deciphering the code behind it!). Then I noticed that the solution was right in front of me, but was not connected to the word search at all: It could be formed by connecting the first letters of the words I was looking for all along! I briefly considered screaming at some teammates, but had to admit to myself that this was, in fact, a brilliant one. The picture below should illustrate what I mean.
We also had a proper puzzle — but not one that you could solve online, you had to print it out, cut out the pieces, properly put it together and send us a picture of it. That’s dedication! Another of these puzzles showed a black playing field with a red circle and the instruction “Catch the red dot”, but when trying to catch it with the mouse, the dot would gravitate away from it, impossible to reach. After trying for one minute without abandoning the task, the solution “Persistence is key” was shown on the screen. I don’t want to know how many laptops and smartphones were thrown out of the window with this one.
Digital riddles: These involved manipulating files or links. For instance, we provided them with a URL containing our catchphrase “ideas worth spreading”, but deliberately misspelled into /ideas-work-spreading. Changing the URL to the correct phrase led to a page with the solution. In another year, we gave them a file with the file extension .weird and the hint “This picture is worth a thousand words” — when the extension was changed to the correct one, the file revealed a picture with the solution.
Experiences & Takeaways
These challenges seem simple to solve, but in reality, it takes some time and several attempts to find the solution. Over the past two years, we have not been overrun by entries so that everyone who submitted a solution had a decent chance to win a ticket — which is quite fair, given that they invested their time and energy. It’s also fun to see how our own team members start solving these tasks just for the fun of it and even challenge each other to be faster or solve more than others.
For us, this approach is more authentic than a “standard” ticket giveaway that works by signing up for a mailing list or sharing something on social media. The people who participate in the raffle have the feeling that they have done something, achieved something instead of just winning a ticket by chance. Ultimately, we would argue that this also leads to a lower no-show rate for these free tickets.
I asked the Brand & Creative team lead, Maria, what she would recommend to other event organizers who want to try this out, and here is her advice:
- Make challenges that are neither too easy, nor too difficult — they should be solvable, but provide a task to ponder over for 15–30 minutes. Particularly the riddles with an unexpected outcome (such as “Persistence is key” described above) were well-received because they offered an “a-ha moment” and illustrated how simple things can be when you have finally solved them.
- Start with the easier challenges if you plan to do multiple ones (when the first one is too difficult, this deterred people from attempting the subsequent ones).
- Dedicate time to answer questions and react to submissions if needed. Maria answered all the emails sent to the dedicated address, and she also decided when it was worth giving someone a small hint because they were trying but struggling, while making sure the competition remained fair.
Personally, this campaign is one of those things that make me realize that we have assembled a team of crazy people who, given an environment where they can play, make really cool and unique things happen. Also, I will never trust a word search puzzle ever again.
