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Category: SmartHunts

Escape Room SmartHunt

An escape room is a so-called “game”. It’s an adventure where groups between 8-10 people are “locked” in a room. Players must solve a series of puzzles and riddles using clues, hints, and strategy to complete the objective at hand. Players are given a set time limit, usually one hour, to unveil the secret plot which is hidden within the room.

How it began

It all started in 2012 when Swiss physics professor created a scientific escape game for his students. The game was later offered to the public under the name of Adventure Rooms and distributed as a franchise in twenty countries. The Adventure Rooms introduced scientific puzzles to the game and thus Escape Rooms were born. This new craze has really taken off and there are now over 8,000 escape room venues worldwide.

Escape Rooms are now portable!

Best Corporate Events advanced the Escape Room concept and made it high-tech and portable! Teams are assigned iPads loaded with the puzzle challenges. They visit Smart “Stations” and solve the puzzles at each station in order to advance to the next. Similar to Escape Rooms, each completed challenge helps you move on to the next. The only difference between the traditional Escape Room and Best’s Escape SmartHunt® is it allows you to get out and explore! The traditional format of an escape room includes teams of 8-10 people physically “locked” in a room.

They must solve puzzles or challenges including padlocks codes to complete the mission of “getting out”. Much like Escape Rooms, the Escape SmartHunt can contain its own storyline. The storylines were developed to enhance the experience. Rooms can be rated Easy to Very Hard, for those groups looking for a greater challenge. What better way to interact and create memories with your team than the creation of a dramatic experience. Offering just the perfect amount of stress and pressure, individuals are challenged and more inclined to succeed with that small factor of fear in the back of their minds.

Here are the many benefits to completing an escape room with your team.

Teams learn to work together.
They must interact to solve the common goal.
Everyone’s skills are put to use.
Your strengths are magnified when needed.
It’s a perfect activity for groups of any size.
Improve workplace relationships.
Improve productivity in the office.

By adding iPads loaded with the SmartHunts app, teams are presented with a unique and enhanced challenge different than any other escape experience. Now, you can have an escape event delivered for any size group at any meeting venue, in breakout rooms at a hotel, at a resort, or even as a tour around a city! Teams begin their adventure by solving brain teasers to break into a locked container that holds a SmartHunt iPad and all other supplies needed to succeed. Once each team unlocks their container to accesses their iPad, they are free to begin the remaining challenges.

Teams move from location to location and complete a series of escape-themed activity challenges in an effort to earn a key to “escape”. Examples of challenges include clues, puzzles, hidden items, a drone obstacle course, laser mazes, and Nerf® targets, all leading to discovering the secret code which provides the key to the lockbox and their escape. Teams scan QR codes using their iPads to earn points for completing each activity. When all activities are completed, they receive a secret code needed to redeem their key they need to escape!

Can your team complete all the challenges, follow the clues, and find all the stations needed to escape? There is only one way to find out.

Source:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/its-no-puzzle-why-escape-room-adventures-are-so-popular/2015/01/16/938370de-9b4f-11e4-96cc-e858eba91ced_story.htmlhttps://www.newsweek.com/2015/05/01/art-escape-room-323150.html

Company Team Pictures

Since the beginning of time people have been involved with taking a team picture. Remember picture day at school? Your parents would dress you in your best attire and made sure your hair was styled perfectly. From your early years to your graduation from high school or college, each year in school was documented and remembered with your yearly picture.

Team pictures began with taking a picture with your childhood extracurricular activities. Whether it be with your first ballet class to your tee ball team. Team pictures have been captured since the beginning. They still continue even after entering your career. Companies often schedule picture day to capture their team as a group. Knowing how much companies love pictures of their team, we’ve developed the easiest and most fun way to do this during our team building programs.

You get all the pictures!

Best Corporate Events offers over 20+ iPad driven programs where your team can capture all the fun they are having at their event. Thanks to the high-tech app we’ve developed, a variety of our programs come with iPad driven technology that is used throughout the event. And best of all, we provide the iPads!

Our iPad app is a combination of sightseeing, gaming, and laughter and can be delivered anywhere in North America. Teams have fun capturing the activities and different challenges. Our ever-popular City SmartHunt® is the perfect event for companies who want their group to explore a fun city. Your group will experience the cool interactive features of our SmartHunts app on Apple® iPads®. The app utilizes text messaging, audio, video, FaceTime®, social media, QR codes, and GPS with built-in mapping to produce the coolest hunts ever! Teams will discover landmarks, parks, and museums all while taking photos and videos during the hunt.

Bike Build Donation® is our most popular charitable team building programs. Teams build bikes for less fortunate kids in the community. It’s also one of our programs that involve iPads where team members can capture all the fun and save the memories for years to come. We now offer two new versions of our famous Bike Build Donation® building bikes for kids of all ages. Tricycles for young children ages 1 to 5 years old and 26” Cruisers for teens ages 13 and up. At the end of the program, companies might capture a team picture with members of the charitable organization who attend the event to accept the donations.

At the conclusion of the event, we will email a link to your company contact that will contain all the team pictures, scores, and videos from your participating teams!

Corporate Events That Give Back

Besides flexible hours, friendly relationships with coworkers, and career growth, the incoming workforce — aka Millennials — want something else when it comes to their job: corporate volunteering opportunities that fulfill their social responsibility.

For instance, in The Millennial Impact Report, they found that 55% of Millennials said that “a company’s support for social causes was an important factor in accepting a job offer.” And that 78% of Millennials “prefer doing cause work in groups, such as company-wide volunteer days or in a team or department-wide projects.” Volunteering during work hours or having employees volunteer skills to the community can engage employees, increase job satisfaction and can boost team spirit and unity.

Below are five corporate charity events where employees can develop team-building skills while helping the community.

1. Bike Build Donation
As one of our top 10 programs at BEST, the Bike Build Donation involves teams participating in challenges and activities that use engaging audio/video clues to earn the parts necessary to assemble the bikes. The bikes are built for local children in need and once built by the team; mechanics inspect the bikes before taking a group picture. If there is additional time, team members can write personal notes of encouragement to the recipients or create decorative bike license plates. The event ends with a local charity representative accepting the donation, whenever possible.

Check out a recent Bike Build Donation event for Lowe’s employees where they built and donated 1,048 bicycles for local Las Vegas Boys and Girls clubs in the community. See it Here

2. Charity Game Show
This team activity utilizes state-of-the-art game show podiums where employees face-off and “buzz in” an answer to questions from topics ranging from geography and science to sports and entertainment. The Charity Game Show offers a projected answer board, microphones and real game-like visuals and sound effects.

At the conclusion of the event, a team member from your group will deliver a giant check, signed by the members of the winning team, to a representative of the charity of your choice.

3. Bears and Blankets
In this corporate event that gives back to the community, employees will solve text, audio and video clues in order to earn points and use these points to choose their bears and the accompany stuffing. The artistic members of your group will also obtain bear-sized t-shirts that they will skillfully design and decorate. Lastly, team members will use their creativity to swaddle the bears with warm, soft blankets.

Once the bears are assembled, they are then delivered to crisis centers and law enforcement agencies where they are given to children who have experienced trauma. Whenever possible, a representative from the organization receiving your gifts will address your group and thank them for their generous donation.

4. Donation Nation Care Packs
Through Apple iPads, teams will solve text, audio, and video clues as well as complete exciting gaming challenges in order to earn points and retrieve contents of the care packages they are building. In addition, a running scorecard is posted to increase the excitement and energy of the event. These care packages will include specific items needed for the chosen charity. Recipient examples include food banks, hospices, nursing homes, homeless shelters, and other community and social service agencies.

Like the other events listed, if possible, a representative from the chosen charity will visit your group and speak about their organization as well as join for the final stages of the care package assembly.

5. Locate and Donate SmartHunt
Using our SmartHunts innovative application, teams will navigate through a customized scavenger hunt to complete text, photo, and video challenges on their Apple iPads to earn points and see if they can complete the challenge.

Along the route, teams will need to find challenge stations where they receive a surprise package if they complete the challenge. Using the puzzle pieces found in all the collected packages, employees will have to complete the puzzle in order to create a large bank check donation to an organization of your choice in any amount you desire.

Furthermore, following the event, your facilitator from BEST will send team members a link that contains all the photos and videos shot by your team during the SmartHunt.

So, if you’re looking for team building activities that successfully give back to the community, consider these five charitable group bonding activities to use at your next corporate event!

How to find the right hunt for your team?

Groups Love a Scavenger Hunt

So your corporate group is on the hunt for a fun and thrilling team building event. You start by browsing through our Top 10 Programs, and two programs catch your eye; Amazing Chase SmartHunt® and City SmartHunt®. Are these scavenger hunts? Are these team building? Well, you are on the right path as they are both a scavenger hunt type of team building! Remember when you were young, and you played games like manhunt, hide and seek, scavenger hunts or Easter egg hunts? Kids love them and so do adults!

Introducing our high-tech team building scavenger hunts for corporate groups. SmartHunts® are a unique combination of sightseeing, adventure, team building challenges and gamification fun your company will love! If your company is hosting their conference in a fun city, whether metropolitan, small and quaint or a beachside town, then a SmartHunt® is the perfect activity for your group to get out and explore their surrounding city while having fun.

Your group will explore local landmarks, learn fun facts and we can even brand the event with your company logo. The SmartHunts® app allows us to customize the questions and content to your company including points of interest, photo, video, and trivia to meet the goals and outcomes for your group.

Just a few of the benefits of a SmartHunt® include:

Encourage team members to build relationships
Improve confidence
Improve communication
Educate while having fun
Promote positive and happy workplace

Your group will start with an engaging physical icebreaker to form all the participants into teams. Each team is given an iPad loaded with our event app to get things started. Teams are now on the hunt, analyzing clues and navigating their way through the city. Teams will develop the best possible strategy to beat the other teams. Groups use their iPads to answer quizzes, tour points of interest, solve puzzles, and tackle photo and video missions during their hunt.

Once all the challenges are complete, it’s a race against the other teams – and the clock – back to home base. Laughter, accomplishment, and fond memories are additional benefits to this event. Teams will improve trust, communication, and effective problem-solving skills. The hunt features two-way messaging. Teams are connected with our lead facilitator, stationed at the ending location, which tracks racers using GPS. The facilitator downloads photos, video, and scoring throughout the hunt for a big-screen presentation of the action during the event. Teams will never lose connectivity to their game. Een if the hunt takes them indoors. All photos, videos, and scoring are sent to us throughout the event. We will have them on the big screen when your teams arrive at the final location. After the program, we will also send you a link that contains all the photos and videos shot by your group. The page also includes an edited video plus all the scores, photos, and videos from each participating team. Now, that’s SMART!

Try a SmartHunt at your next corporate event

So if your group wants to explore a city, museum, or an attraction, our SmartHunts® location challenges will make sure your teams won’t miss a thing. Our national account managers will take the time to get to know you and your company walking through the details of your upcoming event. Our objective is to recommend the best team building program that will be right for your event whether it’s a SmartHunts® or something that’s customized just for you.

SmartHunts® has been delivering professional corporate team building events since 2010. We have built a solid reputation by working hard to deliver top-quality programming for our clients. Learn more here.

Best Corporate Events and SmartHunts® Hit the Big Apple!

“New York, New York! A helluva town!” –Bernstein, Comden, and Green, authors of ‘On the Town’

SmartHunts, our high-tech scavenger hunts featuring an Apple iPad for every team, are spreading! As part of our partnership with Planet Hollywood® and Buca di Beppo®, SmartHunts® are now available in Las Vegas… and the one and only Times Square in the heart of New York City! Whether it’s sightseeing throughout the area and running into celebrity look-a-likes who help you on your journey or bonding with the Godfather’s ‘family,’ these programs are unique, full of energy, and incredibly fun! Plus, they actively make teams better at collaborating and sharing information. We’re proud to offer SmartHunts that include dinner and drinks at a star-studded location, right in the heart of the Big Apple!

Top Ten Events

“Learn to say ‘no’ to the good so you can say ‘yes’ to the best.” -John C. Maxwell

Clients often ask which programs are our best sellers, so we’ve launched a new page on the Best Corporate Events website: Top Ten Events! It features our most popular events – with links to their individual pages containing full descriptions, videos, and requirements – and will be updated every six months with the latest data. Looking for team building programs that have been honed to perfection and truly work? You’ve found them!

Best TeamBuilding and SmartHunts in Meetings Focus Magazine

“We just did a program… where half their group was in Calgary and the other half in New Orleans. They did a hunt together in two countries in two time zones!” – Best TeamBuilding CEO Scott Flynn, as quoted in the article

Last month, Meetings Focus magazine interviewed our CEO Scott Flynn for a piece about how technology has changed the face of team building. The article, written by Paul D. Kretkowski, starts with our trademarked SmartHunts, the only offering which includes an iPad for every team. It discusses the advantages of a paper-free program: it’s more immersive, better for the planet, can change on the fly, automatically uploads media and tallies scores, memorializes the event with photos and videos shot from the team’s iPads, and can incorporate local landmarks or present company knowledge in a fun way.

We are always delighted to get to enthusiastically share what we’ve spent several years developing into the only iPad-based proprietary scavenger hunt around – and why we believe its advantages make it one of the best, most technologically-advanced corporate events on earth!

SmartHunts®: Video of the Week 2

There are a lot of reasons that SmartHunts® are a step beyond a regular old phone-based scavenger hunt, and every one of those reasons contributes to why we’re the only choice for a company seeking a high-tech, high-energy program. See those iPads throughout the video below? We provide those to every participating team, pre-loaded with our proprietary app, which no other team building company offers. While other folks rely on text, our SmartHunts can use video, photos, mapping, QR codes, messaging, and interactive clues to create an experience unlike any other!

BizBash Features SmartHunts

“Unity is strength… when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved.” -Mattie Stepanek

When BizBash, one of the top news sources for event planning and ideas, recently wrote an article about the future of scavenger hunts being in high-tech options, we knew we were doing something right. In fact, we are the only team building company to offer iPads® with a proprietary SmartHunts app to every team who takes part in a SmartHunt, and BizBash interviewed us about that, ultimately putting us first on their list of Digital Scavenger Hunts. We agree that they are “a great way to get people interacting and collaborating” – and our years of experience perfecting our iPad app and refining our programs mean that we are ready to rock even large groups and teams based in multiple cities!

SmartHunts Introduces Entertainment Hunts in Las Vegas

SmartHunts were already the most high-tech team building scavenger hunts offered anywhere – no other company offers iPads to every team with the proprietary SmartHunts app that offers challenges, tracks points, and collects photos and videos in real-time! Now, we’ve upped the ante, in sizzling Las Vegas, with added entertainment that’s truly “outside the box”. Teams start in our partner company’s locations (Planet Hollywood® or Bucca di Beppo®) and interact with incredible celebrity look-a-likes on their journey that truly brings the activities to life. It’s team building like never before, and of course includes a full meal in addition to all the fun.

Check out Planet Hollywood’s Celebrity SmartHunt and Buca di Beppo’s Dinner with the Mob SmartHunt, plus lots more about our other high-tech corporate events, at smarthunts.com!

Welcome to the BEST blog, a collection of team building articles, industry insights and news about our large collection of programs and events offered in locations across North America.