How to Host a Virtual Super Bowl Watch

Even if your company or group can’t gather in person this Super Bowl, you can still gather virtually for a football watch party.

And your watch party doesn’t need to be a single virtual room. It can actually be a massive, fun, attendee-created party.

Here’s how.

Let attendees create their own watch parties with Hopin’s Sessions

Doing this will give your attendees the power to create and customize the event themselves.

With Hopin, you can allow event attendees to create their own private or public virtual rooms where up to 20 people can stream their sound and video. And this can be the perfect environment for a highly-interactive watch party.

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish Football Team did exactly this during their fall football season. They called their virtual watch party Rally House, and Notre Dame fans could create their own Hopin Sessions rooms inside the event and watch games together.

Up to a few thousand people can join and watch a single Hopin Sessions room, and each Session has its own chat window for people to interact and comment.

Host a massive virtual watch party from Hopin’s stage.

Instead of — or on top of — individual watch parties in Hopin Sessions rooms, you can also present a massive “celebrity” watch party from the Hopin stage.

For example, let’s say a business with a few thousand employees decides to host a watch party inside Hopin to boost employee morale and connection. Their CEO and other members of the c-suite could host a virtual watch party from a Hopin stage and provide commentary on the game as it happens.

This is a great opportunity for employees to get to know company leadership on a more familiar level. Plus, up to 100,000 people can watch an event on the Hopin stage so the entire organization can tune in.

Host pre-game and post-game shows and commentary on a Hopin stage

Again, The Notre Dame Fighting Irish are a great example of an organization who already did this.

During their Fighting Irish Football games, they presented pre-game and post-game shows from Hopin stages with interviews from Notre Dame alumni, athletes and more.

Play your own halftime show.

While it might be hard to compete with the super bowl’s halftime show, you can still offer your own creative halftime show for attendees. Consider creating a show that offers something entirely different than the super bowl halftime show.

For example, look at the Puppy Bowl, an event where adoptable puppies “compete” in a football game of their own. Creative concepts like this may attract an audience despite the halftime show being at the same time.

Create fun polls to keep attendees engaged.

Who will throw the first touchdown?

Which team will fumble first?

Who’s going to win it all?

Using Hopin polls, ask attendees questions like the above to get their predictions on the game and the results.

Set time for one-on-one catch ups before or after the game.

With Hopin’s Networking tool, Hopin can pair event attendees for one-on-one networking or conversations. And with an advanced Hopin account, you can even rename networking with a football theme. For example, you could call it “convos” or conversations.”

Use the Expo area to give people gametime dinner or snacks.

Within Hopin expo booths, you can include a call-to-action button that links off to a website. One way to use this feature for your super bowl party: Give attendees a link to grab an UberEats gift card. They can use it to get a free snack or meal delivered during the game.

If you have sponsors for your super bowl watch party, you can also give them their own Expo booth where they can create unique calls to action for booth visitors.

Host a giveaway from your main stage.

To encourage people to attend and stay engaged at your watch party, you can host a giveaway from a Hopin Stage. For example, you can create your own custom giveaway wheel with wheelofnames.com and ship prizes to winners. Just copy and paste your Hopin registration list into the wheel and then it will randomly select winners for you.

Brothers Code, a non-profit who hosts the annual event The Hidden Genius Project hosted on Hopin, did exactly this and gave away PS5s and Xbox Series X gaming systems to their attendees.