How to Run a Workplace Charity Quiz That Doesn't Bomb (UK Playbook)

A workplace charity quiz is one of the highest-return fundraising activities a UK office can run. Cost is low, organising effort is contained, it’s a social event people enjoy without forcing them to do anything athletic or embarrassing, and the format is familiar enough that you don’t need to explain it. Done well, an office of 30 people will raise £250–£600 in a single evening — more with raffle tickets, a half-time auction and employer matching.

Done badly, the quiz drags, half the room loses by round three, and you raise less than the cost of the pizzas you ordered.

This is the playbook for doing it well. It assumes a UK SMB office of 20–100 staff, a single evening event, and a target raise of £300–£1,000.

Why quizzes work so well as workplace fundraisers

Three structural reasons:

1. The pricing is socially acceptable. A £5–£10 entry fee feels reasonable for an evening’s entertainment. The same amount asked as a flat donation feels awkward.
2. They’re inclusive. Quizzes don’t require fitness, money for kit, or specific skills. Reception, finance, engineering, the leadership team — all on a level playing field.
3. They scale up cleanly. Bolt on a raffle, an auction or a sweepstake on the night and you can multiply takings 2–3x without doubling the work.

For comparison with other workplace events, see our office fundraising ideas guide — quizzes typically out-earn bake sales and dress-down days, and out-earn-per-hour most sponsored physical challenges except marathon-grade ones.

Step 1 — Pick the format

The biggest decision. Three options:

General knowledge

The classic. Six rounds of 10 questions covering history, geography, sport, music, science, current affairs, plus a picture round. Easiest to source questions for, easiest for everyone to play, and reliably broad enough that no team is shut out.

Best for: Most UK offices. Default choice unless you have a specific reason not to.

Themed

A quiz built around a single theme — TV shows, music decades, the company itself, a charity’s work. Themed quizzes work brilliantly when the theme fits the room and bomb when it doesn’t.

Best for: Offices with a strong shared interest (a film studio doing a film quiz, a record label doing a music quiz). Also good for tying into a Charity of the Year — a quiz themed around the charity’s cause area educates and fundraises at once.

Pub quiz format (with mini-games)

Multiple short rounds with a different mechanic each — buzzer round, head-to-head, “this or that”, guess-the-price, name-the-product. More work to design but more memorable.

Best for: Second or third time you run a quiz, when the novelty of standard format has worn off.

Our recommendation for first-timers: general knowledge, six rounds of 10, plus a picture round and a tiebreaker. Total of around 70 questions. Aim for 90 minutes.

Step 2 — Set team size and ticket pricing

Team size of 4–6 people is the sweet spot. Smaller teams struggle on niche rounds; larger teams have dead weight and slow down answer-checking.

Pricing structures that work:

Structure	Example	Notes
Per person	£5/head, pick your own team	Most flexible, simplest to administer
Per team	£25 per team of 6	Encourages team formation, slight discount per head
Tiered with extras	£5 entry + £2 raffle strip + £3 picture round entry	Higher gross take, more admin

For most offices, per-person at £5–£10 is the cleanest. The employer can cover food and drink so the entire entry fee reaches the charity.

If you want to add a matched-giving element, announce it up front: “Every pound raised tonight will be matched by the company up to £X”. This consistently lifts buy-in rates.

Step 3 — Sort the regulatory bits before you sell tickets

A pure skill-based quiz with entry fees that go to charity is not a lottery under the Gambling Act 2005. The outcome depends on skill (knowledge), not chance, and the prizes are awarded to the top-scoring team rather than drawn at random. No licence, no registration.

Two situations where this changes:

You add a raffle, tombola or sweepstake on the night. Those are lotteries. They need to fit one of the licence-free exemptions in Schedule 11 of the Gambling Act 2005 — typically the incidental non-commercial lottery exemption (the raffle is incidental to a non-commercial event) or the workplace lottery exemption (the raffle is confined to a single workplace). Each has specific rules on prize values, ticket sales and admin costs. Full breakdown in our workplace raffles and lotteries guide — read it before printing tickets.

You charge entry but the quiz outcome is decided by chance (e.g. “first team out of the hat wins”). That would be a lottery, not a quiz. Don’t do this — it’s regulated.

If you’re unsure, the Gambling Commission’s public guidance on lotteries is a clear starting point. For larger or recurring fundraising lotteries, you may need a Small Society Lottery registration with your local council — £40 fee, valid for 12 months, returns required.

Step 4 — Write the questions (or buy them)

Three sources, roughly in order of cost:

1. Free question packs from charities. Macmillan, Cancer Research UK, the Stroke Association and many others publish free quiz packs as part of their fundraising materials. Quality varies; usability is high; cost is zero. Best as a starting point.

2. Crowdsource from staff. Ask each volunteer to write 10 questions in an agreed subject area, plus answers and a one-line “source” (so you can defend the answer when a team disputes it). Costs time but lifts engagement before the event.

3. Buy a pack from a paid quiz site. Around £10–£30 buys a full pub-quiz pack. The Quiz Site, Quiz Factor and similar UK providers. Useful when the organiser doesn’t have time to write 70 questions.

Difficulty calibration matters. Aim for an average team to get 6–7 out of 10 per round, with one or two questions per round only the best teams will get. If most teams score 9/10 or 3/10, scores cluster and the quiz feels unfair.

Avoid:

• Questions that punish a generational gap (“Who was Number One in the charts in 1972?”) — bad for younger teams. Use these as bonus questions or the picture round.
• Questions that require specific cultural knowledge in a multinational office.
• Questions that have changed answer in the last year (population of London, current PM, exchange rates) — verify on the day.
• Question order that frontloads the hardest material — teams drop out mentally. Mix difficulty within and across rounds.

Step 5 — Plan the running order

A 90-minute quiz running order that consistently works:

Time	Segment
0:00–0:05	Welcome, rules, how to register team names
0:05–0:15	Round 1 (warm-up — general knowledge, easier than average)
0:15–0:25	Round 2 (geography or history)
0:25–0:35	Round 3 (music — clip-based, breaks up text)
0:35–0:45	Picture round (handed out in printed form, returned at half time)
0:45–0:55	Half-time break — drinks, raffle ticket sales, scoring catch-up
0:55–1:05	Round 4 (sport)
1:05–1:15	Round 5 (science / current affairs)
1:15–1:25	Round 6 (specialist round — themed to the charity or company)
1:25–1:30	Final scores, prize-giving, raffle draw, thank-yous

Build in a half-time break every time. It’s your best moment to sell raffle tickets, announce running totals and re-energise the room. Don’t skip it to save time.

Step 6 — Sourcing prizes

Three tiers of prizes you need:

Tier	Examples	Sourcing
Winning team prize	£40–£100 voucher, hamper, branded merch	Ask senior leaders to expense, or donated by a supplier
Picture round	Bottle of wine, box of chocolates	Cheap; one team prize
Wooden spoon (last place)	Mug, novelty item	Maintains morale for losing teams

Don’t spend the charity’s money on prizes. Every pound of prize spend is a pound the charity doesn’t see. Source prizes by:

• Asking suppliers. Your accountancy firm, IT supplier, agency, landlord. UK businesses get tax relief on donated trading stock to charity so the ask is genuinely small.
• Asking local independents. Restaurants, breweries, gyms, cinemas, hotels. Vouchers cost the donor nothing until redeemed, so conversion is high.
• Asking senior staff to donate experiences (an hour with the CEO, lunch with the leadership team, a “skip the queue” day for IT requests).

Avoid prize types that introduce regulatory friction:

• Alcohol as a raffle prize is permitted under licence-free exemptions (no specific ban under the Gambling Act 2005), but be sensitive to participants who don’t drink and to recovery groups in the workplace. The Gambling Commission’s general advice is to consider vulnerable participants.
• Holidays and high-value experiences can push you above the prize-value caps for incidental non-commercial lotteries (£500 limit on the cost of prizes the event organiser pays for — donated prizes don’t count). See our raffles guide.
• Cash prizes for the raffle are allowed but feel less in the spirit of a charity event and reduce social media share-ability.

Step 7 — Pick the tech

For an in-person-only quiz with 5–15 teams, you don’t strictly need tech — a microphone, a scoring spreadsheet and answer slips will do. For hybrid quizzes, or larger groups, software helps.

Tool	Cost	Best for
Kahoot	Free tier, paid Pro from ~£15/month	Real-time gameplay, leaderboard automation, picture rounds
AhaSlides	Free tier, paid from ~£8/month	Polls + quizzes, good for hybrid
Slido	Free tier	Q&A and quiz mix, good for corporate setups
Quizlet Live	Free	Team-based, education roots
Spreadsheet + pen and paper	Free	Old-school in-person quizzes

For hybrid: Kahoot or AhaSlides on a laptop screen-share via Zoom/Teams, with the quizmaster reading questions out loud and remote players answering on their phones. Audio quality is non-negotiable — invest in a USB microphone if the office laptop’s built-in mic is poor.

Step 8 — Inclusion

Three groups commonly get left behind by workplace quizzes:

Remote staff. Default to hybrid even if 90% of the office is in-person. The 10% who join remotely remember being included for the rest of the year. Run the picture round as a shared Google Doc or quiz-app screen so remote teams aren’t disadvantaged.

Non-native English speakers. Avoid questions that require knowledge of UK-specific slang, advert taglines, soap operas or 1970s pop culture. Tilt towards visual, mathematical and globally-relevant questions.

Staff who don’t drink. Have soft drink options, don’t make alcohol the centrepiece of the prize structure, and don’t run the quiz at a venue that’s a pub by default if you have a mixed-religion workforce.

Step 9 — Payouts to the charity

Where the money goes after the quiz:

If you collected through an online platform (Enthuse, JustGiving, GoFundMe Charity), the platform pays out directly to the charity, claims Gift Aid on eligible donations, and you have an audit trail. Recommended.

If you took cash on the night, count it with two people present, bank it, and pay it across to the charity by bank transfer with a clear reference. The charity cannot reclaim Gift Aid on pooled cash — there’s no donor declaration tied to each donation. If Gift Aid matters, push entry payments through a sponsorship page rather than cash.

For matched giving: pay the match across separately, with its own reference, so the charity can see exactly what came from the workforce and what from the company. Helpful for both reporting and any future Charity of the Year renewal.

A note on tax and reporting

Quiz entry fees and raffle tickets are not “donations” for the entrant — they buy a participation experience and a chance at a prize. Gift Aid does not apply to them.

However, any additional voluntary donations on the night (round-ups, “buy the answers” jokes, the running totals bucket) are donations. Those can be Gift-Aided if you collect a declaration with each one. In practice, the easiest model is a single online fundraising page that anyone can top up at any time during the evening — the platform handles declarations automatically.

For the employer’s own books: matching contributions and any direct sponsorship by the company are deductible against corporation tax under HMRC’s guidance on tax relief for charitable donations by companies, provided they go to a UK-registered charity or CASC.

After the event

Three things to do within 48 hours:

1. Announce the total. “We raised £X — thank you.” A single Slack post, a single email. Visible totals drive engagement next time.
2. Send pictures of the cheque presentation (or a contact name at the charity who confirmed receipt). Closes the loop.
3. Diary the next quiz. Quarterly cadence works for engaged offices; bi-annual is plenty for most.

A repeating quiz with predictable dates (“first Thursday of every quarter”) consistently outperforms ad-hoc quizzes because attendance compounds — people block out the date in advance.

Common pitfalls

• Quizmaster reading too fast. Pace is everything. Read each question twice, slowly. Repeat the last 2–3 questions of each round before moving on.
• No answer sheets pre-prepared. Print numbered answer sheets in advance so teams aren’t fumbling for paper.
• Scoring done live by one person. It will fall behind. Have two scorers, ideally with a shared spreadsheet that totals automatically.
• Disputes handled badly. Pre-commit a rule: “the quizmaster’s decision is final, and we have a written source for every answer if asked”. Settles 95% of arguments.
• No half-time. The biggest single mistake. Half-time is where the money’s made and where the room’s re-energised.
• Running too long. 90 minutes feels short until you’re in it. 2.5-hour quizzes lose half the room by the end.

Sources

• Gambling Act 2005 — full text
• Gambling Act 2005, Schedule 11 — exemptions for licence-free lotteries
• Gambling Commission — types of lottery
• Gambling Commission — guidance on workplace and incidental non-commercial lotteries
• HMRC — tax relief on trading stock donated to charity
• HMRC — tax when your limited company gives to charity
• Find your local council (for Small Society Lottery registration)

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FAQs — JSON-LD enabled

Questions HR keeps asking.

How much should we charge for entry to a workplace charity quiz?+

£5 per person works in most UK SMBs. £10 if you're providing food and drink. Discount slightly for team buy-ins (e.g. £25 per team of six). The price needs to feel meaningful but not exclude lower earners. The employer can subsidise by absorbing food costs so 100% of the entry fee reaches the charity.

Is a charity quiz regulated as gambling?+

A pure knowledge quiz with entry fees and prizes is generally not gambling under UK law because the outcome depends on skill, not chance. But if you bolt a raffle, tombola or sweepstake onto the night, those elements ARE lotteries under the Gambling Act 2005 and need to fit one of the exemptions — typically the incidental non-commercial lottery exemption or the workplace lottery exemption. See our raffles guide.

How long should a workplace charity quiz last?+

90 minutes is the sweet spot. Six rounds of 10 questions each, plus a picture round, a half-time prize draw and a final round. Anything over two hours and engagement falls off, especially for hybrid teams joining remotely.

Should the company match what's raised?+

Yes, where possible. A 1:1 match on quiz proceeds roughly doubles money raised, costs the employer very little, and gives leadership something to announce. Even a capped match (e.g. up to £500) is effective.

What if some staff are remote?+

Run it as a hybrid quiz. Tools like Kahoot, AhaSlides, Quizlet Live and Slido work for mixed in-person + remote audiences. The quizmaster reads questions on Zoom or Teams, participants answer on phone or laptop. Hybrid quizzes typically raise less per head than in-person but the inclusion benefit usually outweighs that.

Where do we source prizes from cheaply?+

Ask suppliers, local independent businesses, and senior staff for donated prizes. UK businesses get tax relief on the value of donated trading stock to charity, so plenty of suppliers will say yes. Local restaurants, breweries, gyms and cinemas are good targets. Don't spend the charity's money buying prizes.

Do we need to register a workplace quiz with anyone?+

No registration is needed for a skill-based quiz with entry fees that all go to charity. If you're adding a raffle alongside, the raffle may need a Small Society Lottery registration with your local council if it doesn't fit one of the licence-free exemptions. See our raffles guide.