How the evening works
Most social nights leave the hard part to you: walk in, find someone, start a conversation, keep it alive. Ours does that part for you, and it does it with games rather than with a host telling everyone to mingle.
Doors
Come when you like between seven and half past. Your host meets you at the door and you get a number for the evening. Numbers, not names, are how the room refers to each other. Easier to shout across a bar, and nobody has to remember eleven names in ten minutes.
A game, straight away
No mingling, no standing about with a drink working out who to approach. The first thing that happens is a game everyone plays at once on their own phone. Within five minutes the room is laughing at the same thing, and that does more than an hour of introductions.
Tables, and they are teams
You are seated with people you did not arrive with. The table is your team for the round, so you have something to do together immediately. Nobody has to open with what do you do.
Mingle rounds
The screen pairs the room by number and puts a question up. Ninety seconds, then everyone moves. All the meeting-lots-of-people of speed dating, without the interview, and with a bell that rescues you rather than traps you.
Picking
Quietly, on your own phone, you choose the people you would like to meet again. You get a small, fixed number of picks, so choosing actually means something. Nobody can see what you chose. Not the room, not your table, not the person.
Home
The big screen shows one thing at the end: how many matches the room made. Not who. If you and somebody picked each other, we introduce you by email the next day. If you did not, you hear nothing, which is the entire point.
Three things we decided early
Numbers, not names
Everyone gets a number for the evening. It is easier to shout across a noisy bar, and it means the big screen never shows a name.
Mutual only
A match needs both people to have picked each other. Nobody is ever told who picked them, and no phone ever says you were not matched.
We broker the introduction
No phone numbers change hands on the night. If two people match, we introduce them by email and they take it from there.
Is it just for singles?
No. The same evening runs as a singles night and as a night for people who simply want to widen their circle after moving, or after a long relationship, or because a social life is harder to build at thirty-five than it was at twenty. The picking layer can be switched off entirely.
What if I am rubbish at games?
Then you are in excellent company, and it makes no difference. Nobody wins anything that matters. The games are there to give the room something to do together, not to sort people into good and bad.
Can you run this for our company?
Yes, and it is the same mechanism with the picking taken out. Conferences, new intakes, merged teams and Christmas parties where the tables do not mix. The corporate page has the run of it, the sizes and the price.