By now, we’ve all accepted that the holidays will be different this year. Your annual company holiday party at the fancy restaurant? A no-go. Your extended family’s traditional White Elephant night? Not happening. But just because we can’t gather in person, it doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate the season together. To help you do so, Beth Lawrence Meetings & Events decided to ask some industry experts for their virtual holiday party ideas.

Virtual Holiday Party Ideas

We spoke with Roshni Shukla, the Head of Storytelling at Lemonade. Lemonade is a social platform that empowers creators to host and share products and experiences anytime, anywhere, with anyone - virtually or at offline events. Their vision lays in innovating event creation and skill monetization by the touch of a button and they’ve done all this with a remote team united under one vision across 8 countries. Lemonade prides themselves on being scalable to any size, catering to your entertainment needs, and having especially unique features that make virtual events very close to the real experience.

We also sought out the expertise of Mark Surkin, Co-Founder/CEO of Dineable. Dineable is a Philadelphia-based company that offers coordinated catering for virtual events. Their services hand-deliver food and drink to attendees of virtual events. In fact, we have been an attendee at such an event. Dineable believes that “just because COVID has made the world go virtual in so many ways, it doesn’t mean we can’t share a meal with our colleagues, co-workers, friends, families, and maybe even some new connections.”

Read on for our insightful conversation with these industry powerhouses.

BLME: How can companies (or social hosts) have their virtual holiday party invoke the same feeling(s) as their traditional ones do?

Roshni, Lemonade: Offline social interactions versus virtual ones are undeniably different experiences. However, at Lemonade we use unique experiential touch points and features to invoke feelings as close to the traditional events.

Engagement is key here, some of the ways to do so:

Personalized digital invitations
Special access codes to unlock ticketed events
Opportunities to redeem gift hampers or even corporate holiday boxes
Festive notifications within an event that trigger memories of a traditional holiday party.
Sharing moments together: ability to send friend requests, real time live chat, watch content together or even simply hang out with each other despite being miles away.

A sampling of event types that Lemonade can host.

Mark, Dineable: Honestly, they won't invoke the same feelings and that's OK. We have to embrace that. Part of what makes change hard is when we fight it or try to make the things we do now feel exactly the same as things we did before.

It's like making substitutions for dietary restrictions (which is what Dineable helped with pre-COVID). You can have an event with Rueben sandwiches for lunch and serve dry, crumbly gluten-free bread to the person with celiac disease, or you can turn that corned beef & swiss into an amazing rueben taco on fresh corn tortillas. We all know the taco is different, but it's still awesome, and that guest feels great and, more importantly, included in the shared experience.

That's the true goal of running any event: bringing people together to share an experience. It's never about the sandwich. Substitutions often suck because we're too shortsighted & linear about them. Now with virtual events, too many people are stuck on the sandwich, so to speak. The problem isn't that we're not in the same room together-- the problem is that we just need to come up with new ways to build shared experiences.

BLME: How can you promote attendance to those who may be reluctant about a virtual event?

Roshni, Lemonade: Whether an event is curated online or offline, it’s quality of production or story it tells really drives attendance.

Some of the ways Lemonade facilitates key promotion integrations is by allowing you to:

Showcase your branding through the event landing page as well as help curate personalized content depending on a creator, community or brand’s end goal.
Creating personalized discount codes for sponsors, early bird guests, communities or even influencers to promote the event for you (in return, they have the opportunity to get incentivized for every redeemed discount code).
Vendors or brand partners can enhance virtual events through integrated e-commerce. This allows you to gain strong allies in promoting an event to communities that may be difficult to otherwise tap into. The bigger the reach, the more the sales and engagement, it’s a WIN-WIN!

Mark, Dineable: That's a great question. I think you can boil most event promotion down to FOMO. That's fine... we do it with Dineable too on our new website. But situational awareness is really important. This has been one hell of a year, to put it mildly, so right now even more than usual, I think the most important thing is to meet people wherever they are, without any pretense.

To me promotion is about being honest and being real and not being pushy. People could have any number of reasons for not wanting to join an event, and whatever those reasons are, they're very real and we shouldn't try to push past them with insincere or overly persistent marketing / sales.

So in other words, keep using FOMO, but back it up, and don't be pushy about it. Be creative, try new things, share your successes, and learn from your failures. People will see the successes and they'll talk about them. They'll want to be part of it. And when you talk to your guests & clients about your failures, and learn from them about how to do better next time, they'll often come back because you made them part of the solution. You'll get the FOMO you're trying to promote just by building great events and being honest with people.

A Dineable catered meal paired with a virtual event.

BLME: What is one (or a few) unique and distinct thing you would incorporate into a virtual holiday party if you were the host?

Roshni, Lemonade: Lemonade has more than 5,000 verified creators in all creative fields like professional Michelin star chefs, world class DJs, acoustic musicians, leading yoga teachers, the greatest mixologists and talented artists from all over the world. For us, it is about customizing an experience to your end goal (raising funds, driving sales, creating awareness or simply having a social experience!) . A lemonade experience can be anything you want.

Christmas for example, is about surprising people and giving back to others in need. Employees can receive gift boxes which can be sent directly to their homes before the virtual event takes place. In return, you can choose a social impact organization (gender equality, sustainability, LGBTQ, homelessness, animal rights etc..) which employees can contribute to with a click of a button within the event. You not only spend an unforgettable night with your colleagues, but also support a cause in need.

Mark, Dineable: I'm loving a lot of the simple but thoughtful ideas that I've been seeing lately. One group we did an event with, they had us include an activity bag with the food delivery. They did a word search together while drinking craft beers and noshing on German food. Who cares that they weren't in the same room? They were together and that's what counts.

I'm also really enjoying these interactive educational / social virtual events that folks are putting together. We work with a few partners who do wine tastings & we'll pair food with them. The tasting hosts make everyone a part of it. You learn about wine, you have a great time, and by the end you've had so much fun that you forget it's all happening through a computer screen.

The simple acts of sharing laughter, sharing a problem to be solved, sharing tastes and textures and knowledge, those are the things that bring us together.

Just because the holiday season won’t look the same this year, it doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice creating a sense of togetherness and celebration. With this expert insight, you can do so by implementing some (or all!) of our virtual holiday party ideas.