Virtual White Elephant Gift Exchange Events for Groups and Teams

Once the Holidays start to approach, you may be looking for some festive options for celebrating with your team members.

While there are a lot of different holiday events that you can host, since gift-giving tends to be a key part of the season, you may want to consider hosting a white elephant gift exchange.

What is a White Elephant Gift Exchange?

White Elephant gift exchanges have been a part of the holiday season since the late 19th century, drawing on a probably apocryphal story of the king of what was then Siam giving elaborate and unwieldy gifts to dignitaries who displeased him. These gift exchanges would see everyone bringing some kind of comic or undesirably funny gift to the event. Then, in some predetermined order, everyone would either open up a sealed gift or they would steal a gift from someone who had already opened their gift (and the person whose gift was stolen would either open a new gift or continue the chain of theft). The idea has broadened and now, there are fewer gag gift white elephant exchanges and more ‘gifts people will legitimately want to steal from one another, ’ which adds an additional layer of fun to the proceedings.

Nowadays, group team building white elephant exchanges usually bypass the process of each person bringing a gift in favor of working with service providers who handle running the event and disturbing the gifts as part of a holiday group event. This takes a lot of the preparation work out of the equation and it ensures that everyone will be able to participate (since they won’t have to deal with the stress or obligation of finding a gift). This also ensures that there will be a fun variety of gifts to open and steal, since you want the white elephant to be more than a glorified grab bag.

Why Host a Virtual White Elephant Gift Exchange

White elephant gift exchanges make for excellent holiday events and are perfect ways to celebrate the end of the year and reward your team members for a job well done. These low-stakes gift exchanges require very little from participants and allow everyone to engage in a shared holiday experience by doing little more than showing up to a virtual meeting space. They will have the chance to chat with one another, play some fun holiday games and answer some trivia questions before diving into the gift exchange portion of the event. 

These events are so easy to run that after you get an accurate head-count for the event, there is nothing to do except tell your team members when they need to show up and how to log into the virtual space. Being virtual also comes with its own set of advantages, primarily that your team members can participate in the event from the comfort of their own homes, eliminating the need to travel to and from a venue and the need to find a way to bring a potentially large gift home. In addition, since your team members will already be at home, not only can their family participate in thinking through what gifts are worth stealing, but they can also be more relaxed. If someone wants to participate in a nice warm blanket with a hot cup of cocoa or a nice glass of wine, they can feel free to relax and enjoy their evening.

Host a White Elephant Gift Exchange with CourseHorse

If you are looking to host a virtual white elephant gift exchange for your team, you can sign up for either a standard or a premium version of the event:

• Standard White Elephant Gift Exchange: This virtual team building holiday event costs $70 a person and can accommodate up to 200 participants. All gifts are curated by CourseHorse.
• Premium White Elephant Gift Exchange: This virtual holiday gift exchange costs $150 a person, can accommodate up to 200 participants and only meaningfully differs in the price of the curated gifts. 

Host a Secret Santa Gift Exchange

When hosting a gift exchange, there are really two options available to you. One is the aforementioned White Elephant, while the other is the popular secret santa gift exchange. A secret santa gift exchange sees everyone who is participating randomly draw the name of another participant and they are tasked with secretly getting that person a gift. Then, everyone comes together (either at a holiday party or just for the gift exchange) and exchanges their secret santa gifts. Usually, this involves playing games of some kind and guessing who was whose secret santa. These events are particularly popular because they are relatively hands-off and they can be made even more hands off by working with service providers like CourseHorse, who will run the event for $70 a person, helping every participant customize their gifts.

Advantages of a Secret Santa Gift Exchange

Running a secret santa gift exchange may put slightly more responsibility on individual participants, but it helps ensure that everyone who participates receives a gift that feels more personal than the random gifts that you would receive in a white elephant gift exchange. This also means that the event is likely to serve as a more coherent team-building activity, since to get a good gift for someone on your team, you need to ask around and try to learn more about them. This can make the gifts feel even more personalized and it can help participants feel more engaged in the event as a whole.

Advantages of a White Elephant Gift Exchange

White elephant gift exchanges often feel lower stakes and more engaging for everyone involved, if only because they don’t have to add the stress of personalizing a gift for someone else in the office. You also don’t have to worry that anyone is going to feel disappointed (or even upset) at the gift they receive because wires got crossed or someone simply forgot to participate in the gift giving process. By taking the gifting out of the hands of participants, you may make the event a bit less personalized but you also will help make the event less stressful during the holiday season.

6 Alternative Holiday Events to Consider

While white elephant gift exchanges are certainly a great way to celebrate the holidays, they are far from the only way to enjoy the end of the year with your team members. Consider any of these virtual holiday team building activities:

• Virtual Escape Room: The Office Holiday Party: Solve puzzles, collect clues and work together with your team members to escape a virtual holiday Christmas party. This event Starts at $400 and can accommodate groups of up to 200 (though they will be broken up into smaller teams).
• Holiday Mixology (Kit Included): At $115 per person, you can provide your team members with all of the tools and spirits they need to create festive holiday cocktails from the comfort of their own homes. Participants will get a kit of barware, syrups and garnishes as a professional host and bartender walks them through a trio of themed cocktails.
• Virtual Wine and Cheese Tasting: For only $95 a person, you can treat your team members to a virtual wine and cheese tasting event. All of your team members will have a selection of fine wine and cheese sent to them and virtual host will guide them through the tasting process, giving them lessons in the science of wine and cheese as they enjoy their samples.
• Virtual Holiday Trivia: Give your team members the chance to test their knowledge of holiday traditions, cultural artifacts and history in this exciting trivia challenge. Starting at $400, this is an excellent event to host if you are hoping to add a bit of light competition to your holiday experience.
• Virtual Minigame Showdown (Holiday Edition): For a more varied holiday event, consider this virtual minigame showdown, starting at $400. You and your team members will play a series of short games, ranging from trivia to price guessing games.
• Virtual Holiday Card Workshop: At $80 per person, you can help your team members make personalized holiday cards in this instructor-led crafting workshop. Participants will have all of the supplies sent directly to their homes and an experienced host will show them how to create fun, creative holiday cards to send to all of their friends and family.

Should the White Elephant Exchange Be Held Online or In-person?

When organizing a white elephant gift exchange, you’ll have the choice to hold the event online or in-person. Holding the event in-person seems like an obvious choice, but it comes with a few considerations that you’ll need to keep in mind. The obvious issue is that you’ll need to find a suitable location to hold the event (which can be wherever your institution happens to hold regular in-person events, assuming you have such a place) and you’ll need to find a time that works for everyone to be present physically. Organizing events during the holidays can be difficult, even if the only challenge they present is finding the right time and place for everyone to attend. The main perk of an in-person event is that everyone can come together and enjoy one another’s company while they play their white elephant game, rather than feeling disconnected by the distance of screens. 

Online events come with their own set of affordances and limitations, particularly the fact that everyone, including remote team members or just people away for the holidays, can participate with just the help of an internet connection. In addition, an online event requires less physical space for gifts to occupy, which might not seem like an issue, it does mean you don’t have to actually move any physical objects around (especially if your meeting place isn’t on the ground level). In addition, you can include gifts that you may not have already purchased (or will be purchased for you by the organizer) in your exchange since the gifts will be sent directly to the recipients’ homes after everyone has resolved upon what they are taking home. Online white elephants are also easier to run, since there isn’t any physical exchange of gifts happening and everyone can easily and quickly see what gifts have been opened and by whom they have been opened.

Average White Elephant Group Sizes

Another important thing to consider when deciding how to organize a white elephant gift exchange is your group size and its composition. After a certain threshold, gift exchanges can start to get unwieldy, especially if physical gifts are added to the equation. This means that, assuming you have enough participants, you’ll want to break off into smaller groups after you reach enough people committing to participate. Numbers get easier to handle the more you streamline the process (including playing the game virtually or using simple, easy to exchange gifts in an in-person setting) but at a certain point, if you want the event to run smoothly, you’ll need to separate into smaller groups.

If you are running an event virtually and using a service provider to cut down on the work required of you, these providers can make the process even more streamlined such as duplicating gifts across small groups, so everyone will have a chance at the same loot and there won’t be any group that feels as if they drew the short stick when it comes to what gifts were available in their pool. This will help further simplify the process and it is ideal for larger organizations that are looking to host an end-of-year celebration that will adequately scale to the size of the teams. You can also break your groups off into smaller teams based on things like department to ensure that people are playing the game with the people in the organization that they are most frequently involved with.