What is a Virtual Award Ceremony?
A virtual award ceremony is a celebration held in an online environment via a video hosting platform. It actually brings your employee recognition program to life, allowing you to appreciate and reward your remote workforce for their hard work. Through such a program, your employees are encouraged and motivated. They cherish and work harder, when you recognize their contributions and accomplishments in this way.
Why hosting virtual award ceremonies is a good idea for your business
Awards ceremonies are a great way to highlight employee recognition and reward employees for their hard work. But what if you don’t have the budget or the time to organize an in-person ceremony?
Hosting virtual awards shows can be a great alternative. They are cost-effective, easy to organize, and they can be done at any time of day to suit multiple schedules. This means you can recognize your employees from anywhere in the world!
And let’s be honest. Creating a culture where you publicly and regularly acknowledge the accomplishments of your employees motivates them to keep doing their best work. When employees feel good about their work and contributions, it keeps them around for longer, which helps you retain the best talent.
Now let’s move onto the practical side of how to do an awards ceremony virtually.
How to create a virtual awards ceremony
Let’s dig into what you need to practically think about and organize when hosting a virtual awards ceremony:
Keep audience engagement at the forefront of your planning
You’re hosting an award ceremony to make award recipients feel appreciated and motivated. If your event is lifeless and not enjoyable, this can quickly negate the positive sentiment you want your audience to be feeling.
We’ll dig into more specifics of virtual awards ceremony ideas in the next section, but here are some quick ideas to consider:
- Include a high-energy host
- Invite speakers to motivate and engage employees
- Line up entertaining acts to add to the atmosphere.
Find the right virtual award ceremony software
Award ceremonies can be brought to life virtually with the right virtual event technology—so a lot of the success of your virtual award ceremony hinges on finding the right software. Don’t worry, that’s what Airmeet’s Event Experience Cloud is here for.
Airmeet’s Event Experience Cloud boasts four products designed to help you nail the important large (and small) details of a virtual awards ceremony.
- AirStudio: Get all the tools you need to build an immersive, on-brand experience at one place. AirStudio is your in-house studio. From landing pages and emails to live stage and announcements, organizers can unleash their creativity on experiences that resonate.
- AX360 makes your event experiences engaging, immersive, unmissable, and ultimate networking experience that your attendees deserve. Get everything from life-like networking spaces, to in-event engagement solutions like quizzes, polls, and Q&A. Call people to the stage or give other attendees the chance to show some love with emojis and reactions as recipients accept their awards.
Determine awards categories and have the sequence of awards ready
Think about what types of awards you want to include in your ceremony. Are there particular awards categories you want to stick to?
Here are some types of recognition awards to inspire you:
- Living by or demonstrating the company values
- Most enthusiastic
- Business tenure (i.e, reaching a 5-year milestone)
- Best customer service support
- Best team player (nominated by peers)
- Best leader (again, nominated by peers)
Once you have the types of awards in mind, are there specific gifts you want to send out in advance to award winners? Or perhaps you want to keep it all online and send gift vouchers instead.
Think about a theme or dress code for your awards ceremony
Give attendees the excuse to dress up, even if it’s from the comfort of their homes. Having a dress code for your awards ceremony will make your award recipients feel like they are really attending an event and feeling good for the celebrations ahead. You could even have an award for the best dressed!
Send out email invites
Once you’ve ticked off the main planning steps above, it’s time to get the invites out! Other than the obvious details of what time, and how to join—here are some other details you might like to consider adding in:
- The award categories
- Whether the attendee receiving the email is nominated or potentially up for a specific award
- Some details of the virtual awards ceremony and what to expect (i.e, special performance, guest speakers, etc.)
Build some pre-awards ceremony hype
Think about how you want to encourage attendance and engagement. One effective way is to get active on social media to promote it amongst your employees. You can film short videos of some team members to show their gratitude for particular colleagues and start building anticipation and excitement for the main event.
Now, let’s discuss how to beat event fatigue and make your virtual awards ceremony the most engaging one yet!
9 Great Virtual Awards Ceremony Ideas to Engage Your Audience
If you want to set the tone for your virtual event, you need to be able to engage and entertain your audience. In a physical event, the audience gets to interact with each other physically, but in a virtual setting, it is much less so. That is why you need to incorporate engaging activities in your online event so that the audience stays engaged in the virtual environment, interacts with their peers, has fun, and overall loves the ceremony.
Here are some creative ideas to incorporate into your next virtual award ceremony to engage your audience:
1. Virtual Mixology Class
A virtual mixology class, often referred to as a cocktail class, is one of the great ideas to keep your audience engaged in shared enjoyment. Everyone can sip and savor the drink at the same time, creating a collective “moment” for your audience. In fact, making cocktails together can help team members bond and strengthen their relationships. You can take this mixology class after your main presentation is over, and allow your audience to make drinks like Margarita, Mojito, Martini, and more, creating memorable moments for them.
2. Virtual Scavenger Hunt
In order to encourage engagement for your employees and add an element of fun to your online award ceremony, no better activity than a virtual scavenger hunt. It will foster team-building and create exciting memories for your remote workforce in a virtual setting. In fact, a virtual scavenger hunt can break the ice – it won’t just encourage communication but also cooperation among co-workers. You can choose from a variety of scavenger hunt themes, including “Traditional Hunt”, “Photo Challenge Scavenger Hunt”, “Desk Scavenger Hunt”, and others.
3. Team Trivia
This is a fantastic activity to incorporate into your next virtual award ceremony as it will not only engage your employees but also promote collaboration and boost team morale. Team trivia involves rapid-fire questions that inject energy and bring excitement among your audience.
Here are the steps to play this game:
- Set your trivia questions relevant to your event theme
- Split your employees into teams of 3 to 6 members each
- Establish and explain the rules for the game
- Start the trivia game – ask all teams the first question at the same time, either verbally or by showing it on the screen
- Give teams enough time to discuss and present their answers.
- Throughout the game, track each team’s score and update the leaderboard after each round
- Announce the winning team with a bang and offer them attractive virtual prizes, such as a premium subscription to a streaming platform like Netflix
4. Interactive Polls
You may have added fun activities and games to your virtual event to engage your audience, but running a poll is still just as effective a weapon, as it breaks the cycle of passive listening. Live interactive polls will capture your audience’s attention, encourage participation, and enable you to gather their opinions instantly and in real-time. To obtain valuable feedback from your employees, you can ask a variety of questions, including multiple-choice, rating scales, and open-ended ones.
5. Happy Hour
Happy Hour will give your employees a relaxing break during your awards ceremony. Employees can chat, interact, and engage with team members. They can get away from the screen for a bit and communicate and mingle with their teammates via chat. To make happy hour more exciting for your audience, you can allow them to chat with each other while sipping on their favorite drinks.
6. The Deserted Island Game
This is a classic team-building game that challenges your employees and encourages them to think outside the box. Participants are presented with a scenario and a set of options depending on it, and they must then select the most essential option that is most helpful in that scenario.
For example, here is a question that “If you were stranded on a desert island, what essential items would you choose to survive?” Participants are given a list of items to choose from, and the team will discuss and come to a consensus on which items would help them survive.
7. Two Truths and a Lie
Two truths and a lie is an old classic that may be played at the beginning of an event to energize and excite your audience. In this game, the player has to present three statements, two of which must be true and one must be false. After this, the other player guesses which statements are true and which ones are lies. When team members hear about their peers’ surprising truths and lies, it will create moments of shared laughter and wonder for them. The two truths and a lie game can create memories for employees that will last forever in their minds.
8. Breakout Session
If you want to engage your audience in a spontaneous conversation, then a breakout session is a great activity to go with. It allows you to split the large group into smaller ones, allowing everyone to chance to speak, ask questions, share their opinion, and engage more deeply with their peers. For example, in a virtual award ceremony, team members can discuss who will win an award or who is the leading contender.
9. Rapid Fire Questionnaire Game
It is a fast-paced activity where the players are asked a series of questions, and they have to answer them in no time. Incorporating this activity into your virtual award ceremony will allow you to get genuine, funny, and surprising answers from your remote teams. This game will break the ice and bring a natural smile to your employees’ faces.
How to Make a Virtual Award Ceremony Entertaining?
If you want to make a virtual awards ceremony engaging and memorable for your audience, add something fun that they will love experiencing. The celebration will truly become meaningful and enjoyable for your employees. Let’s look at some creative ideas for making a virtual award ceremony interesting and entertaining.
- Invite Entertainers: In order to make the virtual awards ceremony entertaining, invite an entertainer who can make people laugh with their speeches. They can be a comedian, magician, musician, and more. With their humor, magic tricks, and gestures, entertainers can draw your remote team’s attention and keep their energy high throughout the ceremony session.
- Incorporate Live Entertainment: Incorporate dance session, a virtual museum tour, and live art demonstration, as well as games like a virtual murder mystery game, trivia challenges, and an online escape room. Such an entertainment option will not only engage and entertain your remote employees but also create an experience that will make the online award ceremony stand out.
- Offer Funny Awards: In your online ceremony, give out humorous awards to your remote employees. This will take their energy to the next level, and their enthusiasm will skyrocket. Plus, offering a funny award to virtual teams can help create memorable moments that bring laughter among them.
Here are some funny awards you can offer to your virtual employees:
- First to Arrive in the Meeting Award
- Last Minute Employee Award
- Award for the Best Comedian Employee
- Most Laughable Employee Award
- Emojis Guru Award
- Add Surprise: One of the great ideas to make remote teams curious is to add surprises in the virtual award program. Surprising elements won’t only create a memorable moment, but also allow participants to enjoy it
Following are some surprises that you can give to woo online teams:
1) Surprise Guest: Invite a special guest like a famous person in your industry or a motivational speaker. They will add excitement and increase the prestige of the event.
2) Virtual Photo Booth: Setup a virtual photo booth, with fun digital props, and backgrounds, so that participants can take fun photos and capture memories in their phone during the ceremony.
3) Surprise Gift Deliveries: Plan to deliver unexpected gifts to the residences of employees. Your virtual celebration becomes more real with this. It can also have a positive impact on employees’ families.
4) Virtual After-Party: Plan a virtual “after-party” with a live DJ, virtual cocktails, or a mixology class. This will peak the excitement of attendees and allow them to have fun in a more relaxed environment.
Time to create your own virtual awards show
Now that you know what a virtual awards ceremony is, and some of the best ways to host one—let’s get back to the basics and recap some of the key considerations to keep in mind.
When organizing a virtual awards ceremony, these are the main things you need to think about:
- How long will the event run? This is important, so you don’t get bored of it, or even want to log out!
- Who will be nominated for awards? Make sure everyone gets a chance to be recognized for their work.
- What kinds of awards will be given out? How many awards will be given out?
- Is there a theme or dress code?
- What time of the year is it?
- Would there be social media tags?
- What kinds of activities do you want to include?
- Who will be your guest speaker/s or host for the event?
And last but not least, what virtual event platform will you be using to create and run your awards ceremony? Let’s save you a step, get started with Airmeet.
Final Thoughts
Virtual award ceremony is all about celebrating milestones and achievements. It allows you to appreciate your employee’s hard work as well as thank them for their contribution. When you openly praise your team members’ efforts and accomplishments, their morale improves dramatically. They feel respected and acknowledged, which boosts job happiness.
In fact, virtual awards ceremonies play a vital role in employee retention. When remote employees are publicly awarded through an online ceremony, they enjoy a pleasant experience that boosts their loyalty to the firm and their likelihood of staying with it. So why wait? Plan a virtual awards ceremony straight away to honor the efforts of your remote team.
FAQs
Airmeet is the top choice for hosting the online award ceremony as its user-friendly interface, immense 3D environment, ability to handle a large audience, interactive features and networking capabilities make it a popular choice for hosting online recognition events. Its video streaming capabilities provide a seamless viewing experience for participants, which is why Airmeet is an all-inclusive solution for a memorable and impactful virtual award ceremony.
A virtual awards ceremony is best between 60 and 90 minutes long. Longer virtual events can be tiring, so to keep the audience engaged, entertained, and everyone rewarded on time, don’t keep your awards ceremony longer than 90 minutes.
Yes, a theme for your virtual awards ceremony will greatly increase your participants’ engagement. Choose an appealing theme like “Hollywood Night”, “Dream, Believe, and Achieve” & “Out of this World”.
- Digital gift card to a restaurant and a coffee shop
- A voucher for an online fitness membership
- Movie night kit
- Tickets to a local sports game
- Custom box of company-branded gifts
