Hosting an international Gift Exchange with White Elephant Online
One of the amazing aspects of remote work is the ability to bring people together from literally every corner of the globe. Companies large and small have remote teams spanning time zones, countries, languages and cultures. When it comes to the Holiday season, many teams want to create a unique, shared experience despite being miles apart.
We often get asked by companies with distributed teams if they can play White Elephant internationally. The answer is yes! White Elephant Online is an online platform that will work in any country.
However, when it comes to choosing & sending your gifts, it’s worth putting some forethought into how you organize your game.
Here are a few pointers for hosting a great international office holiday party for your remote team
Understanding how the gift distribution works
The way our platform works is that players will submit a gift from any online retailer of their choice, choosing their own wrapping & box options for display on the virtual ‘gift table’. After the game is complete, we let everyone know which gift they won and who won their gift so they can coordinate and mail it to them directly.
Where you may run into problems when playing with an international group is when a gift submitter chose a retailer who doesn’t ship to the recipient’s home country.
Option 1: Find a global retailer
One simple solution is to find a retailer that ships to all the countries represented in your group. Large retailers like Amazon ship most everywhere, though be careful: sometimes not every item is available to ship everywhere. You can find Amazon’s International Shopping here, and more general information about their international shipping here. Other large retailers are also likely to work, though it may depend on the specific countries of your remote workers. Once you choose a retailer, just have all participants stick to that retailer when choosing gifts for the exchange.
Option 2: Play multiple games
Depending on the size of your company or team, you may want to split into multiple White Elephant games anyway. For example, if you want a game that takes around 30 minutes, you’d want 25-35 people playing. So if you have substantial teams in each country, you could have each team play within their own country and avoid the international shipping issue altogether. You can learn more about our group size recommendations here.
Option 3: Play together, but color-code the gifts
We get it - sometimes the point is to break down those barriers - you want everyone playing together! Well, if that’s the case (and you don’t want to limit to one specific retailer), another option is to color code the gift-wrapping of the gifts based on the country of the submitter. For example, the United States is blue, Canada is Red and Costa Rica is Green. Tell all the players to wrap the gifts in this way, and once you play everyone can stick to their country when opening or stealing gifts. It’s more limiting, but gives you the benefit of all being together sharing in the laughs and festivities. (Pro tip: if you take this approach, you’ll also want to append a country code to the name of the gift. For example “(USA) Star Wars Trivia Game”. This way, even once the gift is opened and there’s no more wrapping paper, players who want to steal gifts know which country is which).
Option 4: Play with gifts, but send gift cards after
Two of the Gift Distribution Options we provide incorporate sending a Gift Card of equal value to the gift the person won. You still submit & play with real gifts, making the event fun, but at the end each person gets a gift card and can purchase the gift themselves. This takes all the logistics of sharing addresses and shipping internationally out of the equation. You’ll just want to make sure that the gift card you purchase (e.g. a Visa Gift Card) will work in the countries of your team.
No matter how you approach your game, White Elephant is a fun event that creates lots of laughs and lets your team members show their personality. Sign up for free below, and start planning your international holiday party today!