Let’s be honest. Most meetings are boring. The speakers are sharing information we really should know about – and in most cases WANT to know about – but the presentation leaves us unenthused.

Most meetings and public events are passive. The exciting stuff happens on stage and we sit inert as the information washes over us. We lose focus. Our minds wander. We miss it all. We leave wondering what just happened and we make excuses not to attend the next one.

To combat this, we developed the idea of the Queen City Show. The Knight Foundation gave us a grant in 2016 to create an entertaining way to structure community discourse – by treating it like a game. By making it fun.

We were supposed to do five Quiz Shows to prove our concept. We did 15 instead. Once people experienced it, we were invited to add a quiz to their next meeting – taking the data they want their audiences to learn and “gamifying it.” That’s why, six years after the Quiz Show was supposed to wrap, we’re still creating public and private quizzes for municipal groups, companies, and community organizations.

Our latest? A live, online, phone-based quiz about the dangers of vaping for the Mecklenburg County Health Department and Livable Meck.(And, yes. We made it educational AND fun.) LEARN MORE HERE.

When Honeywell moved to Charlotte, they began work on a building that would make their employees feel right at home. Unfortunately, COVID-19 pushed all of their plans back. The time to bring their team into their new office hit in the fall of 2021. By that point, many of the employees were new. Not only did they not know Honeywell, but they also didn’t know the new office and each other. 

To help them feel right at home AND excited to be in Charlotte, Honeywell engaged us to conceive, manage and organize five weeks of lunchtime engagements that would surprise and delight their teams and encourage them to come into the new building and congregate.

We did just that, assembling and managing more than 20 different artists and groups that ran the creative gamut - from musicians and fiber artists to shoe designers, floral artists, and pet portraiture artists. (Yes. You read that right.) As the weeks went on, the employees engaged with the artists and each other more each week.

Wells Fargo asked us to help them engage a new generation of community leaders inside their Charlotte office. To help these employees fall in love with Charlotte and encourage them to get involved in Wells’ name, we created a program where experienced executives could nominate emerging leaders to participate in a series of events held in innovative and exciting community spaces across the city.

At each meeting, we employed quizzes, games, micro-talks from inspiring community leaders, and performances from local creatives. In between events, we invited the cohort to participate in challenges and secured access for them to other community meetings, events, and gatherings that would help them further ingrain themselves in Charlotte. 

At the end of the program, participants reported feeling much more connected and ready to get involved in Wells and in community work.

• 95% emerged feeling more connected to Charlotte and their co-workers
• 100% emerged more informed about their company’s work in the community
• 77% were encouraged to get more involved in the Charlotte community
• 91% were ready to join a board or internal community committee

Need more information, from initiatives like Charlotte SHOUT!, the City of Charlotte’s Corridors of Opportunity Program, Livable Meck’s education programs, SHARE Charlotte’s annual campaign, and team engagement programs for Deloitte, Lowe’s, and UNC-Charlotte, we’re happy to provide more examples of our creative approach to community engagement.

And, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can riff off the above … or we can create something totally new for you. We’re ready for the challenge. Put us in, coach!