A Nice Little Party Gimmick

Recently a friend and I thew a little party, and wanted to layer on a format or gimmick that would get help people mix and mingle between groups more easily.

The main constraint was that we didn't want anything that felt forced or awkward, and we didn't want to make anyone talk to strangers if they really didn't want to. And of course, given how parties work, the format needed to be robust to the fact that 30% of the rsvps would not show up on the day, and various people would arrive late or leave early.

Here's what we did, and it worked out pretty happily:

• When people arrived, we asked them to write their name on a piece of card and drop it into a hat. (We didn't explain why, and tried to act mysterious).
• After about 30 mins, we passed the hat around the room and everyone picked out a name from it. If it was someone they already knew, we asked them to put the name back and pick another.
• Then, everyone was told that they could/should try to find the person whose name was on the card at some point before the end of the party.
• That's it.

Obviously this enabled most people to meet two new friends (the person they found, and the person who found them) during the course of the party. But it actually did a lot more than that: it gave people a nice excuse to go up to any group of strangers and say "hey, does anyone here know [name]?" and then either stick around and talk if they seemed amiable or move on to another group if not.

Before the party we worried whether the system would break down because e.g. towards the end people would find that every name in the hat was someone they already knew, or they would pick the name of somebody who had already left. But as far as I can tell none of this actually mattered. If this comes up I would have happily just cheated and e.g. personally given the remaining people the names of strangers to look for.

But I think the excellence of the format was that, as mentioned, it turned out that finding the person you were looking for didn't actually matter as much as just having the permission to go looking. (The life-metaphor embodied here is left up to you).