Staying in touch during the pandemic is pretty difficult. A text here and there just doesn’t seem like enough to stay close with your dear friends.
Additionally, the ability to get together with the entire friend group at once is pretty much eliminated. There might be a way to get together with friends without actually “getting together,” though.
We’re going to offer up some unique online party ideas today, giving you some food for thought on how you might be able to see everyone all at once again. Let’s get started.
Online Party Ideas to Get You Through the Pandemic
The first step to take is finding the right video conferencing application to suit your needs. You can choose between Google Hangouts, Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, or any other platform that you can find online.
The nice thing about the platforms listed above is that their basic accounts are free and most people are pretty familiar with them. They’ll all work pretty well for your purposes as well.
Zoom, for example, is used ubiquitously in schools and businesses right now. The platform can be used to effectively group a large number of people into one party and each person can communicate as they please.
Once you’ve got the environment chosen, you can start to flesh out your party!
Pick a Theme and a Dress Code
You want your party to be more than just a video call, so it’s important that you add a little flavor to the gathering.
Is there a theme that ties your friend group together? Maybe you all met at a soccer camp, or in a college class that focused on a notable piece of subject matter. Maybe you’re all huge Harry Potter nerds or love Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Whatever ties you together can be a great theme for your digital party. If you can’t come up with any themes that are particular to your group, you can always go with general themes like “70s” or just call it a costume party.
After your theme is chosen, you can choose a dress code. The great thing is that there won’t be too much effort necessary because you can only see everyone’s head and shoulders.
There’s still a lot of room for exploration, though.
Send Invitations
What better way to invite everyone to your virtual party than with physical invitations?
Mailing out invitations is a quirky way to keep the party spirit going and add an element of normalcy to the process. Plus, setting a date and giving real invitations makes the party more of an actual event and less of a boring old video call.
Even sending online invitations will get the job done. The point is to make sure that the event is just that, an event.
It’s probably been a number of months since any of your friends had a legitimate social event to attend, so they’ll be excited to mark something on their calendars.
Play Online Party Games
You’ll need some kind of activity to keep the party going. There are a lot of online games that you can choose from, but it’s also possible to play some of the classics like charades, dictionary, or even battleship if you want to pull out the equipment!
If your crew is down for it, it might also be fun to make things competitive and set up a little tournament bracket. Not all friend groups are overly competitive, but the ones that are will love an excuse to try and win something again.
Games aren’t everyone’s things either. If that’s the case, you might consider signing up for a virtual escape room to work through together.
Escape rooms give you an exciting way to do some problem-solving together and have a unique experience entirely online.
Make It a Dinner Party
Remember dinner parties? When we would sit extremely close together and enjoy a meal together?
It’s still possible to eat and share each other’s company, even if we’re not sitting right next to one another at the table. Make it known in advance that everyone’s expected to cook the same meal and that you’re going to eat it together.
This is just another way to make things feel relatively normal. You might even try to cook the meal together at the same time.
Decorate Your Wall
The finishing touches of a party are always the decorations. If you’re hosting an online party, you should at least do a little work on your end to decorate.
Everyone else might not be able to decorate or even want to, but your effort to set the mood will be appreciated by those in your virtual meeting. Even if there’s just a balloon or two or a poster related to your theme in the background, it will show that you care about the meeting.
Watch a Movie Together
If you’re running out of ideas on how to extend your party, you could always incorporate a movie into the mix.
Most streaming platforms offer a way for friends to get together and watch a movie or show at the same time. You can still talk and interact with one another on your virtual meeting platform and have the streaming service playing a move at the same time.
Little touches like this will work together to make the night pretty meaningful, especially considering that the last 12 months have been void of most meaningful events.
If everything works out, you might decide to keep having parties until the pandemic finally lets us back out into the world. We’ve made it this far in isolation, so it’s important that we incorporate virtual events like this into our lives and stick it out until the virus is gone.
Need Tips for Unique Online Party Ideas?
Hopefully, the online party ideas above have stirred up some party potential for you and your friends. You might need a little more food for thought, though, and we’re here to offer up ideas.
Explore our site for more great ideas for an online birthday party, online party prizes, tips on hosting, and much more.
