Burns & Porter Associates is often cited as bringing the pub quiz to popularity in the late 1970s. A worldwide pastime not exclusively reserved for the boozer, pub quizzes can boost revenue on slower nights.
Traditionally played on pen and paper, I will lay out the main drivers for switching to a smartphone quiz platform, such as Engagewall.
Six Reasons Pub Quizzes Must Go Digital
- Save Resources
- Reduce Admin
- Capture Audience Data
- Realtime Scoring
- Make it Hard to Cheat
- Reduce Physical Contact
1. Save Resources
Going digital means no more paper, pens, spare pens, and printer/copier ink.
Usually, all of the paper ends up in the bin. So apart from the faff of making sure that's on every table, there's an environmental bonus too.
2. Reduce Admin
It's a drag manually laying out quiz questions for print. Even if you use a template, it's still a time-consuming process.
From drag & dropping rich media to importing everything from a spreadsheet, an online quiz platform gives you the tools to create and distribute quizzes easier and faster.
3. Capture Audience Data
In a standard pub quiz, participants usually hand over their team names to the host—and maybe an entry fee. Other than that, the host has no more information about its audience.
Here's where smartphone quizzes excel. On signing in to a smartphone quiz, you could ask a user their name, email, and permission to send them info about future events and promotions. You could be uber slick and send the winning team a voucher to return another day for their first drink on the house.
4. Realtime Scoring
Waiting for the results of a quiz with even just a few teams can be a real buzzkill. Digital quizzes are scored in realtime so that you can display live leaderboards at any point in the game.
Knowing the scores mid-quiz can give the host entertaining content to work with. For example, hosts could big up the leading team or open up some banter for silly answers and leaderboard position changes.
5. Make it Hard to Cheat
In a smartphone quiz, you can impose a time limit on how long a user has to answer a question, making it more difficult to Google the answer, and leaving memory recall for the win.
A business upshot from deterring cheaters is that a quiz can award more impressive prizes, which in turn can attract more teams or justify higher entry fees.
6. Reduce Physical Contact
Post COVID-19, it's important to reduce contact between guests of different parties. Taking the pens away and any interaction between teams necessary for shared marking helps create a safer environment. 
