Location: your local pub, village hall or school
Date: this event works on any day of the week, preferably in the evening after work
Invite: friends, family, neighbours, work colleagues and pub regulars!
How to raise money: decide on how big you want your teams to be (usually 4 or 6 people), and ask people to enter their team, paying an entry fee for each person. Raise extra money by selling alcohol donated or sold at cost by a local wine merchant or hold a raffle.
Promote: quiz questions – set some rules e.g. no conferring between teams, answer sheets must be handed in to the quizmaster at the end of each round, books/mobile phones etc may NOT be used to find answers. Questions can be on anything! You can get them from searching on the Internet (try www.quizzing.co.uk), or you could ask local teachers, gardeners, etc to set questions on their area of expertise.
After each round, the question sheets should be swapped with another team and marked as the quizmaster reads out the answers. Sheets are then handed in to a scorekeeper, who notes down the marks on a continuous score sheet for everyone to see.
You can also allow teams to use a ‘joker’ card on one occasion before a round commences, and then the team's score on that round is doubled. The winning team receives a [donated] prize.
Prizes: ask your local shops and businesses to provide a prize e.g. a food hamper, wine or gift vouchers.
Food: talk to the pub and ask about food for free or a reduced price, or get all your friends to make a curry/lasagne that they can bring on the evening.
Drink: if your venue does not already have an alcohol licence you may need to apply for one. If you decide to run your own bar then make sure you buy the alcohol on a sale or return basis (or get it donated), and hire the glasses for free from a merchant such as Majestic.
Case study: Corinna raised £300 from a pub quiz at her local pub to raise money for Trek China. The quiz tickets were sold for £2 each, and the landlord compered the evening having written all of the questions himself, with a ‘guess the famous person’ round.