The Ultimate Digital Scavenger Hunt: A Complete Guide

Updated: August 08, 2022

What is a Digital Scavenger Hunt?

A digital scavenger hunt brings the best of two worlds together: it’s a fun, team building adventure, made easy by digital technology that streamlines the process for all involved. A digital scavenger hunt gives you the opportunity to explore as much or as little of your local area as you’d like, while integrating fun concepts and activities for your participants (making it a great activity for a number of different groups, as described below).

Who is a Digital Scavenger Hunt For?

A digital scavenger hunt can be designed for any one of a number of groups or venues, depending on what you’d like to accomplish. The list below gives you a few ideas, but feel free to expand on what’s below as you plan a digital scavenger hunt that’s tailored for your specific needs!

Team Building Scavenger Hunt

When you’ve got a group of people who will be working together in a professional or academic environment, a digital scavenger hunt is a phenomenal way to facilitate collaboration and foster new relationships. Challenges can and should include elements specific to your organizational mission, providing a fun and risk-free way to get your team familiar with each other and your corporate objectives.

College Campus Scavenger Hunt

College campuses are great environments for digital scavenger hunts, as they are always bustling with activity! College traditions and campus landmarks make creating challenges easy as well, giving your students a fun way to learn more about their campus community.

Conference and Trade Show Scavenger Hunt

What better way to spice up a conference or trade show than with a fun, digital scavenger hunt? With all of the vendors, activities, and people, building out a list of challenges for your participants to complete is easy - the only question is, who will get them all done first and emerge victorious?

New Hire Orientation and Employee Scavenger Hunts

New hire orientation can be daunting for participants, and a digital scavenger hunt is a great way to keep the learning going (while still ensuring your participants have fun!).

Zoo Scavenger Hunt

A zoo is a wonderland of fun animals and great opportunities for your participants to take entertaining photos as part of a digital scavenger hunt. Not only do they learn about new animals, they continue to build relationships with their fellow participants as they race to complete their challenges.

Classroom Scavenger Hunt

Looking for a way to engage your students in a classroom setting? A digital scavenger hunt is a perfect way to introduce them to new or existing elements in their own classroom and to foster new friendships with their classmates.

City Scavenger Hunt

A city is a massive and robust venue for a digital scavenger hunt, with a plethora of museums, restaurants, landmarks and other, distinct attractions to use in your challenges. Especially in pedestrian-friendly cities, a scavenger hunt is a great way to get your participants out into their local area as they have fun and learn more about their city.

How to Create a Digital Scavenger Hunt

Once you’ve settled on your venue, you’re ready to take the next step: building out your digital scavenger hunt! Doing it digitally gives you quite a few more options for what you can include, with a focus on interactive methods like photos and videos. The list below provides you with an overview of the vital components you should consider when deploying your digital scavenger hunt.

Use an App

This is the easiest way to streamline the process for both you as the administrator and for your participants. An app delivers all the benefits of automation and efficiency and ensures everyone is kept in the loop with real-time notifications and updates. As an added bonus, an app leverages built-in smartphone functionality so the breadth of activities can expand without requiring additional equipment.

Use Photos

Incorporating photo challenges into your digital scavenger hunt is an easy, fun, and memorable way to get your participants engaged with one another and your selected venue. Opt for challenges that ask your team to take photos with one another or, if you’re feeling bold, one or more strangers.

Use Videos

Similar to photos, a video captures the fun had by your team as they complete their requisite video challenges. Common examples include asking participants to sing, dance, or re-enact their favorite movie scenes with one or more people. Not only is it an entertaining part of any digital scavenger hunt, but the videos are also great to have for future use and promotion of other, upcoming scavenger hunt activities.

Use QR Codes

Using a scavenger hunt app on a mobile phone enables all of your participants to easily use QR code technology, where the phone scans the QR code on a specific object. It’s a great way to get your hunters focused on finding something specific, with a fun way to verify that they found it successfully.

Use GPS Check-ins

Another fun way to incorporate location is via GPS check-ins, an integrated component of all high-value digital scavenger hunt app providers. Get your employees to a specific location in your chosen venue, and have them prove it via the GPS data.

Use Trivia

Do you have a lot of information you want your team members to know? Incorporate it into your digital scavenger hunt! Whether your trivia relates to your organization and its history, or to broader topics like pop culture or current events, there’s nothing like trivia to bring out some healthy competition!

The Benefits of Going Digital

As you’ve seen in the variety of challenge types you can have, a digital scavenger hunt opens a new world of possibility for your participants. Along with those new possibilities come new benefits for both you and your hunters.

Automatic Scoring

Using an app takes the hassle out of the scoring process. You won’t have to manually collect and evaluate hunt submissions - it’s all done via the automated backend of the mobile app. Not only is this an efficient and hands-off way of tabulating scores, it also provides for real-time updates for you and your other participants!

Innovative & Interactive

Technology makes things easier, and this is a way to demonstrate innovation while supporting your goals for team building and collaboration. Your team will interact with each other in a new way, made possible by new technology.

Leaderboard

The most competitive among your scavenger hunt group will enjoy the real-time leaderboard feature of most mobile apps, as it gives them the strongest incentive to accelerate their efforts in order to win.

Photostream

All of the photos taken by your digital scavenger hunt teams can be displayed in the photostream feed, which is an amazing way to engage all of your participants (as they watch their peers have fun and complete each challenge). Submitted photos are also great to use for the future, where they demonstrate the value and fun of going digital for your team building scavenger hunt activities.

Social Media

Social media is a ubiquitous tool, and it’s best when used for the greater good. Your digital scavenger hunt app can seamlessly integrate with your participant's social media feeds, to further expand the reach and impact of your selected activities.

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As you can see, there are numerous benefits of going digital for your next team building scavenger hunt. Although we might be a little bit biased, we think your best bet for accomplishing everything above is to use Scavify, our proprietary app developed with you and your employees in mind. It’s an intuitive tool that makes life easier for you as you plan, and your team as they hunt. Start exploring today!