<p>I'm on my residence hall's "Hall Council" and we get $2,000 to spend each year on activities for my residence hall. We threw a cookout recently to try and get everyone to know each other. Only 70 people out of 300 in the whole hall showed up. </p>
<p>What are some ideas of activities/projects/competitions etc that you've seen at your residence hall that have really worked in getting people out of their dorms and meeting other people in their hall? </p>
<p>Thanks,
Senator Pierre haha</p>
<p>I’ll tell you what DIDN’T work out. Glow-in-the-dark Capture the Flag. Sounds like an awesome idea, but quite a few people got hurt. My friend tore his ACL, another guy broke his pinky, and one guy got punched in the face, breaking his glasses.</p>
<p>Root beer pong went over fairly well at my dorm. Also a “do you know your roommate” game, where you had to answer questions about them (what toothpaste do they use, color of their towel, any pets, etc). Winners went on, eventually overall winners got some kind of prize…</p>
<p>ETA: Also organizing get togethers watching a popular show/awards/sports in the big lounge (we had one at least) with food got many people out…</p>
<p>We had something where we played games and had a cook out. Each floor was on the same team. Since it was two towers for one dorm with one tower being a girls side and the other being a guys side, they were still on the same team. We played stuff like dodgeball, tug of war,etc etc. Pretty fun. Pretty good turnout too actually.</p>
<p>A few years ago, the girls on my son’s dorm floor hosted the boys for a Sunday night football tailgate party; the boys reciprocated by throwing a midnight breakfast party (beginning at about 2am) on a Saturday nightsunday morning a few weeks later.</p>
<p>Sex Ed Session.</p>
<p>They got us there by using posters with a banana that had a condom on it, + time and location.</p>
<p>
What’s funny about what you wrote is that I think 23% resident turnout is actually pretty good - I’m involved with with the RHA here at UCSB. Off the top of my head, “cheap” events that we usually get good turnout for are things like Open Mic night and video game tournaments. Another one that worked well for a residence hall split up into a bunch of different little buildings was an Olympics-style event.</p>
<p>I’m still thinking about how to plan unique, fun and/or interesting events here, so I guess I’d ask the same questions to the residents in the halls I represent…</p>
<p>When we first moved in this year, everyone got a white T-shirt with the name of our dorm on it. Then, later in the week, when people were settled in, we tie-dyed them outside on the lawn. It was a very good turnout. We had a magazine that showed how to get different designs of tie-dye, and that helped a lot. If you do have design instructions like that, though, make sure you make more than one copy.</p>
<p>Another activity we had at my dorm (that doesn’t cost any money) is a game called Assassins. There are a bunch of rules to it, but the gist is that everyone is assigned someone to “kill” (a.k.a. throw a SOFT object at). You have to kill your target without anyone else seeing you do it. If you kill them, they are eliminated and have to give you the name of the person they were supposed to kill, and then that person is your new target. The elimination rounds keep going like this until there is one “ultimate assassin” left.</p>
<p>Another activity that I haven’t personally seen, but that I’ve heard about is a “set up your roommate” dance. It’s pretty self-explanatory; the dorm hosts a dance, and everyone has to set up their roommate with a date. This might be difficult to pull off as a getting-to-know-you activity though, since many people might not know people to set their roommates up with. Still, it might be worth a try.</p>
<p>Another thing we have at my dorm is weekly “munchies.” The dorm is divided into suites, so each week a different suite is responsible for purchasing food from a different country (they get reimbursed) to share with the rest of the dorm. This usually has a pretty good turnout (who doesn’t love free food?), but might get expensive with 300 people who might show up; my dorm only has about 100.</p>
<p>That’s all I can remember for now. I’ll post more later if I remember more. Good luck!</p>
<p>They have TONS of ice cream socials here so apparently they turn out pretty good, we did one for my floor at like 10pm on a Sunday so everyone was home and that turned out pretty well.</p>