Company Anniversary Celebration Ideas That Use Your Own History
A company anniversary is the one day of the year when generic is the worst thing you can be. Here is how we take a company's own history and turn it into an engaging experience people love to play.
Before every event, we interview the client to understand who the group is.
For anniversary celebrations, this conversation goes further by transforming company history into the foundational raw material for custom gameplay.
The core building blocks remain consistent across successful events: turn key milestone dates into interactive clues, weave founders into challenges, and design custom activities around pivotal moments in company history.
Keeping everyone connected within a shared game structure ensures full inclusion, while capturing high-impact photos and videos creates memorable keepsakes that last long after the event.
Every Anniversary Event Starts With an Interview
Sometimes it's a milestone or an anniversary and that's the whole reason for the day. A lot of times it's an offsite, they're doing a meeting somewhere and we're part of that, and the milestone rides along with it. Either way the process is the same, and it starts with us asking questions.
We've done a lot of these. One-year birthdays, five-year, ten-year, 25-year for companies. In every one of those games there's a section where we can focus on them, on what's really important to them and what they want to highlight about their company and their history. Plus the fun stories that happened along the way.
That information comes out of the interview.
Your Founding Year Becomes a Number People Have to Go Find
The easy one is the dates. If there are dates that are important to the company, dates where things happened, we use those numbers to build clues.
One clue is just the founding year. Go take a photo with your team in front of those numbers. Now they're out in the city looking for a street address with that number on it. It's a small thing to design and it works because the number belongs to them.
The Founder Look-Alike Challenge Puts the Founders Into the Game
Sometimes we'll do a doppelganger. Here's the original founder of the company, go find a look-alike out there, and get a photo with them.
That one is just fun.
We Ran Our Own 25th Anniversary as a Scavenger Hunt
cityHUNT started with Polaroid cameras. That's how all our games worked 25 years ago, and it's a big part of our history. That piece is the one we wanted to celebrate when we built our own anniversary game. Get a picture of your team with a Polaroid camera. Somebody has to go find a Polaroid camera out in the world.
Every company has a version of the Polaroid. Whatever they're proud of, or something they did originally, that's the challenge. We find out what they want to focus on, and then we build it.
The Invitation Can Be Part of the Surprise
Companies usually handle the invites internally, since they're the ones booking it. The ones I've seen have been fun.
People have done handwritten notes with post-its, made something out of them, taken a photo of it and sent that out. I've seen people cut letters out of a magazine. It really depends on how creative the person sending it wants to get.
Sometimes the invite doesn't say it's a cityHUNT at all. It's a surprise. The invite just says wear weather appropriate clothing and comfortable shoes, and that's the whole message.
If a planner wants help with that part, we'll brainstorm it with them when they meet with their cityHUNT producer. We can tell them what other companies have done, what's worked, and what this particular group is likely to be open to.
An Anniversary Has to Work for Everyone in the Room
The customization is half of it. The other half is the secret sauce, which is building an experience where everyone can have fun. Not just the people who are into scavenger hunts. Introverts and extroverts both. We build the game around really understanding who the population is first.
If you're worried about a big group splitting up on a day that's supposed to be about the group, I've written about that in keeping large groups connected.
The Photos and the Videos Are What They Actually Keep
This part is very meta.
They have a good time playing the game, which is the day itself. Afterwards they've got all the photos and all the videos, and what they can build out of that is a really fun story of their own history.
That's what makes it more than cake.
People Remember the Thing They Were in Flow For
Dropping people into flow states is really important to what we do. We mix positive psychology, gamification and mindfulness to get there, and flow is where memories get locked in. The dopamine and the endorphins are part of that. I've written more about that psychology in why we celebrate last place as loudly as first.
We recently had a client who did a celebration with us, and then the next year they did something different. People were upset right away. They were asking why they weren't doing the cityHUNT again.
People remember the connection and they remember the fun, and it's not on accident. There's a whole science behind it.
A 100 Year Milestone Built Out of Pella's Own History
Pella came to us around their 100-year milestone. The occasion was their annual leadership retreat, their top 100 leaders brought into Des Moines, and the milestone rode along with the meeting, which is the usual shape of these.
What they asked for was something that nodded to their history, so the history is what we built. Sixteen teams of five or six worked a jigsaw puzzle of Pella's own historical timeline. They built windmills out of Magna-Tiles, because the company's roots are Dutch. There was a window washing challenge with putty paint and Windex, which ties straight back to what they actually make. Trivia ran between the physical rounds, on brand down to a music round themed around windows and doors, and the bracket narrowed sixteen teams to one winner.
Kourtney Baker, their corporate events manager, put it this way afterwards: "Our leaders are very competitive and there had to be a clear winner at the end, but we also wanted it to feel good and give back." The full write up of that day, including the charity side of it, is in the Pella case study.
What a Milestone Is Actually For
Whatever you're proud of, whatever you did originally, that's the content. We just take it and turn it into something people have to go out and do.
If you've got a milestone coming up and you don't want the generic version of it, come find us at cityHUNT. We'll build the game out of your own history.
