What "extras" have been successful at trivia style events?

Reader question:

What “extras” have been successful at trivia style events? We are deciding on extra money makers like a silent auction, coin toss, guess the jelly beans in a jar….. what else has/has not worked??

Here are some ideas from our Facebook community for successful extra fundraising activities during a trivia night:

• Paper airplane races. Gold coin per sheet of paper, people can have a few rounds to make them. Then everyone lines up and throws them at the same time (if you don’t have as much space, you can do heats – we have trivia nights in the gym so plenty of room). We knock out the half that flew the shortest and had a few rounds, and eventually a winner.
• Heres something a bit different – In Perth where country towns were abbreviated and we had to work out what town it was eg LG lake Grace, PH Port Hedland.. makes you think about your state this was a sheet on the table and was bonus points.
• We did a multi-draw raffle .. drawn throughout the night .. tickets were only sold on the night but we had some big ticket items which encouraged more people to come to the trivia night.
• I remember a Barbie toss being popular with the men, especially after a few drinks, the competitive streak kicked in. Barbie dolls tied to posts you had to throw a ring over them.
• Buying answers to questions. We do $2 per answer but only allowed to buy two answers per round. (We actually have an article about selling ‘cheats’ if you want to read more on this idea)
• Take time do easy things like 100 club, lucky dips, heads and tails.
• We just held one and used “red dots” – 5 dots available per round sold $1 per dot. Put the dot next to the answer your are positive are correct to double your points. We had 6 rounds of trivia so that was roughly $30 extra per table and we had 14 tables -$420 cause who doesn’t want to increase their chances of winning. 
• We also did the red cheating stickers and that made SO much extra cash! People love to cheat! tables could buy a set of 5 dots, they could then put a dot next to any spot on the answer sheet. If they got the answer correct, with a dot, they would get two points instead of one. If they got the answer incorrect with a dot, they still got a point (so basically it was just paying for an extra point!!!). We sold them for $50 for 5 (although I realise that may be unrealistic at some schools- maybe $20?) Originally we were going to do a max of two lots of 5 per table, but we had the tables lined up to buy more so we ended up letting them get more. It was very hard to turn away $50 notes being handed to you when we were fundraising for the school. I think we made about $1500 from this alone!!
• We had a great silent auction, all items donated so a big earner and everyone goes home with an item or two.
• We got a wheelbarrow donated from Bunnings, then asked all the families to bring in a bottle of something (wine, bubbles, beer etc). We then auctioned it but would probably be a great raffle prize (could sell tickets to those not attending prior to night then).  
• If you have some good helpers, you can provide platters for the table (pre-ordered). We sold for $70 (for 10-12 people) but they only cost $40 each as the helpers were great bargain hunters and bought all cheeses etc when half price.

 

Click on the Facebook image at the top of the page to head to the thread and contribute your own ideas! While you’re there, make sure you like our Facebook page if you don’t already!

---

You might also be interested in:

• A Trivia night could be the answer to school fundraising
• Trivia night ‘filler activity’: Spaghetti Tower
• Last Man Standing Raffle
• Human Hungry Hungry Hippo