Trivia Night Activities: selling cheats

Trivia Fundraising Ideas

Today I want to talk about selling cheats. Cheating can be a very profitable and fun activity for trivia nights if presented in the right way.

Cheating involves being able to ‘buy’ correct answers or certain advantages in activities throughout the evening.

The ability to ‘cheat’ needs to be declared (and promoted!) upfront. Everyone needs to fully understand the rules and how they can participate. There are ways to go about it that don’t involve sabotaging the integrity of the contest.

Ideas include:

Selling cheats as stickers that can be used instead of a correct answer.

Alternatively, after each round of answers (as long as the answer sheet needs to be delivered to the judging table), the cheat money can be delivered at that time.

A good price is $10 per correct answer, but feel free to charge more if you have a particularly joyous crowd!

The price can go up as the evening progresses and everything becomes more competitive.

You may choose to limit the number of ‘cheats’ available to each team. One per round, for example, or a sheet of 10 stickers per team.

An alternative to the selling cheats is to sell ‘double point’ stickers – along the same lines as the ‘cheats’ but they can choose to double an answer they feel to be right.

Teams could also nominate at the beginning of the night to have double point rounds for their specialty subjects. Or even, double or nothing rounds – if tables answer 50% of the questions in a certain round correctly, they get double points.

Keep your tables updated through the night on who is scoring the most points – this can fuel the competitive spirit and boost the cheating budget!

For certain filler activities, it may be possible to sell ‘cheat’ advantages. For example, for the Spaghetti Tower challenge you can sell an extra centimetre of height for $10, or for the coin slide, you can do the same.

The main challenge of making this work well is to keep everything fun and light. For very serious trivia buffs, going too hard on the cheats might otherwise be frustrating.

Often, the crowd may not see the value in cheats until towards the end of the night. For this reason, selling a sheet of stickers rather than ‘one per round’ can be most profitable as they can all be used in a final round (for example).

As always, happy to hear your tips, ideas, and experiences.

Happy fundraising!

Written by Mandy Weidmann