Virtual Tours Archives - Chicago Detours

How to Connect Teams with Virtual Events

Ellen — Wed, 19 May 2021 16:30:00 +0000

If you’re reading this, then you know that team-building virtual events are essential for remote teams. With the explosion in virtual tour options out there, it is now even a bigger challenge to choose a team-building activity that will help employees collaborate, cooperate, learn and have fun together.

We want to help you! We’ve hosted more than 27,000 remote guests on virtual tours. And we’ve done a ton of market research on what people are looking for in team-building virtual events. Follow these guidelines here for a successful team-building experience!

WHY DO TEAM-BUILDING VIRTUAL events AT ALL

Coordinating team-building virtual events for either fully remote or partially remote teams involve unique challenges, particularly the challenge of physical distance. When you choose a great team-building virtual event, then everyone gets a chance to have some fun while boosting engagement, promoting teamwork, improving communication, and inspiring creativity.

Corporate team-building virtual events, like our virtual tours, promote improved communication between colleagues, ultimately boosting productivity. For managers, these events give invaluable insights into their team’s strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps most importantly, these events express to your employees that you value them.

The main challenge, of course, comes in picking virtual events that the whole team will love. We have spent thousands of hours on product development, game testing, and event hosting. Safe to say we know a thing or two about finding an activity that accomplishes all of these things. So how do you pick a team-building virtual event from the multitude of options

PICK A VIRTUAL TOUR WITH GAMES

Nothing gives folks a break from their workaday life like some game time. It’s become increasingly common for companies to set aside time for games (and other fun). These breaks let employees relax and enjoy one another’s company. The bond shared between colleagues is often an essential element in employee retention. Creating a culture where people are working with friendly faces and want to keep on doing that is essential,. That’s especially true with continuous changes to what the workplace looks like. These games help promote a fun company culture and retain top talent.

There’s a lot of virtual iterations of popular in-person games. Something like Online Pictionary works well in virtual events because it can be played simultaneously by many people on different devices, while still allowing for creativity and personality.

We adapted several popular game formats for our virtual tours with Chicago Detours. Standbys like trivia are a fun way to get the team involved in friendly competition. We slotted a quick trivia game right into the start of our Badass Women of Chicago History virtual tour. Scavenger hunts are another popular standby for teams that want to have fun together as a group. For our scavenger hunts, like we have on our Innovations at the 1893 World’s Fair virtual tour, teams decode clues before they can correctly hunt for the object.

Promote Innovation and critical thinking

The best team-building events prompt colleagues to work together to solve a problem or stretch their imaginations to do a creative activity together. These group activities promote positive working relationships, and sometimes simulate real-life on the job problem-solving. Critical thinking exercises and creative challenges also build connections and allow colleagues to potentially see new sides of one another. “Did you know that Bob from accounting is incredible at riddles??” “Who knew that Karen could solve a puzzle so quickly?”

One of the classic examples of how collaboration can lead to critical thinking in virtual events is the GeoGuessr game. A hit right from when it debuted, the game drops you into random world locations on Google Street View and tasks participants with working out where they are. The closer your guess is, the more points your team is awarded. Teams can work together, conversing over the visual clues and debating where to place their guesses. It’s a game that shows off both geographic knowledge (which, uh…may or may not be useful in your workplace?) and a critical capacity to weigh options and probabilities (definitely useful in your workplace).

Activities that promote creative thinking is one aspect of virtual tour hosting that we really excel at. On our Deep Slice of Chicago Food History virtual tour, for example, our guests team up together to create a new signature Chicago dish facilitated by our live event hosts. They have to mix and match ingredients to create a speculative meal that can win the rest of their colleagues’ approval.

Cementing Bonds Despite the Distance

One of the biggest challenges of remote working is the lack of connection to your teammates. IMs and emails are insufficient replacements for the natural bonds that form with the physical comradery one finds in the office; however, remote socializing is important to combat loneliness for remote teams. An entertaining and educational virtual event breaks folks out of their Zoom fatigue through socializing around a shared experience.

They carry a corny reputation, but well-executed icebreakers are great at establishing a shared experience. The folks at Miro have created a nice list of 15 icebreakers that can be useful for team-building. Something as simple as a Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament can be hugely effective. Icebreakers don’t have to be high-concept. Something simple, like sharing the results of a personality quiz, are fun and effective.

How Team-Building Virtual Events Promote Bonding

A good team-building virtual event makes it feel as though your team is together (while not physically being together). We’ve recreated the experience of a traditional in-person city tour on some of our virtual events, such as the Cruise from your Couch Virtual Boat Tour. Using 360-degrees images from Google, we’re able to virtually traverse the famous skyscrapers along the Chicago River. The fact that the event is virtual actually adds even more possibilities – guests love being able to pop off the boat to see inside views from the top of the Sears Tower or the opulent interior of the Civic Opera House.

Similarly, we love hosting groups that can use their time with us to have a good laugh. The commentary of our event hosts often elicits lots of chuckling. Guests frequently shake with laughter when a colleague pretends to be a little German child in early 20th Century Chicago during our Holiday Stories virtual tour. That shared mirth is priceless. These activities include the added benefit of showcasing personalities, furthering efforts to get to know colleagues and form camaraderie.

SWAG FOR TEAM-BUILDING VIRTUAL EVENTS

Obviously, the primary goal of a virtual team-building event is to give everyone a chance to socialize and bond. That alone has a tangible long-term effect, providing more energy and connection across the board.

That said, there’s lots of ways to take that good feeling and make it tangible –with gifts! We can help arrange shipping for various swag options or food or beverage kits that align with each virtual event. You can send a Badass Women Journal to all of your attendees on a Badass Women of Chicago History virtual event. The images on the Deep Slice of Chicago Food History virtual tour often make folks hungry–so it pairs perfectly with frozen deep dish pizzas shipped to everyone’s home!

Even if you don’t select a swag option shipped to each attendee, the virtual tour can still have positive ripples in your community. We donate proceeds from the Badass Women Journal To the South Side Giving Fund; for the Cruise From Your Couch Virtual Boat Tour, you have the option of sponsoring local wildlife and supporting the mission of the Friends of the Chicago River. Your contribution includes one printed certificate and fact sheet about your animal.

DEBRIEFING ON YOUR TEAM-BUILDING EVENT

We’ve found, and HR professionals agree, that having a reflection can help that morale boost last. Prompting participants to think about what they learned, saw, or did helps them identify and articulate the personal and professional value that they will take with them from the experience.

Debriefing is a powerful tool. A successful team-building event should be so engaging that workers are only present in the moment. Taking that moment to reflect cements the experience. It can get employees to understand the relevance of the exercises to the everyday tasks of their job and collaborating with their fellow workers.

Team-Building Virtual Events Can be a Real Boon

Overall, we hope our guide has helped you think about how to choose an awesome virtual event for your remote team. A break from work to socialize and interact fosters good relationships and a happy team makes for a happy business.

– Ellen Bushong, Sales Manager and Event Host

How We Designed the Badass Women Virtual Event

Marie — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 18:03:56 +0000

Our “Badass Women of History” virtual event has been getting a lot of attention, with features on NBC Chicago, WBEZ, WGN Radio and more. We’re so excited to share this event with our guests. Let me give you a peek into the hundreds of hours that went into its creation. In fact, the road to creating the Badass Women virtual event began over three years ago!

A Women’s History Storytelling Event

In 2018 we were looking to expand our storytelling beyond our normal walking and bus tours. We wanted to celebrate women’s history and connect with our local community, so we created a live storytelling event, “Badass Women of Chicago History.” Guest storytellers from the city spoke and used historic photos to tell the audience about awesome women that aren’t household names but probably should be. We got such positive feedback that we decided to make it into an annual event. And 2019 sold out, too!

In early 2020 we were geared up for another sellout crowd, with an incredible lineup of presenters, but….it was scheduled for late March. Needless to say that live event did not happen. I was heartbroken to see the work I put into that event fall to pieces. But like so many of our plans for 2020, we had no choice but to shake it off, pick ourselves up and just move on.

Telling Women’s Stories in New Ways

As we pivoted in spring 2020 to the virtual space, I drew on my background in women’s history to develop some of my early virtual tours. I had always wanted to do a “Women’s History Tour” for Chicago Detours, but the locations made it logistically impossible. They were too far apart to create a walking tour, and even a bus tour of these sites would take a few hours in traffic. So a virtual tour of women’s history was actually an unexpected opportunity! Through Google Street View I could take guests to the Museum of Science and Industry to talk about the White Rabbits, and then up to Lincoln Park to view the former Chicago Women’s Liberation Union headquarters, all within seconds!

In 2020 we also designed the “Badass Women of History” journal, wanting to carry on the legacy of our events from the past years. We picked eight women to be included in the journal, with custom illustrations and short biographies, plus inspirational quotes from more badass women. Some of the women were featured in the “Women’s History Virtual Tour,” and others were ones whose stories I had been looking for a way to share.

The “Badass Women” Virtual Event Takes Shape

Within a few months of doing virtual tours, we had become experts in the booming world of virtual events. Amanda was being invited to industry talks to help others pivot to virtual. We choose to turn the women’s history event into a core product for our business. Naturally the name “Badass Women of History” was aptly descriptive itself, and so we decided to stick with it!

We knew we needed to design a compelling narrative, choose striking visuals, and develop meaningful interactive elements.

I made a list of every woman I’d ever featured in a virtual event, written about on our blog, or found in research for our 20+ walking and bus tours. This ended up being around 80 women! From there, I narrowed the list down by trying to represent a wide range of accomplishments, from science to culture to community leadership. We wanted to cover a sweep of history from the 19th century to the late 20th century, and we sought to include women from diverse backgrounds.

This led to some really hard decisions! For example, while I loved the story of both Maria Tallchief and Katherine Dunham, and though their stories are very different, we did not want to have two dancers on the list. I also really wanted to include an athlete, and had an amazing example in the story of Tillie Anderson the champion cyclist. However, her story was similar in time period and ethnic background to Enid Yandell, and in the end we chose Enid.

Making the Stories Exciting!

We didn’t want the Badass Women virtual event to just feel like a series of biographies one after the other. Instead, we identified a “superpower” that made each woman such an inspiration, like Iva Toguri’s integrity or Naomi Weisstein’s positivity. By identifying these character qualities, we felt we could really create an event that used the stories of the past to inspire people for the future.

We found awesome photos, in some cases with the help of archives like the Filson Historical Society and the Chicago Public Library. We had a graphic designer make it look really eye-catching. We wanted to do justice to these women’s stories, and the visuals make that possible.

Finally we tested out interactive elements that would make the Badass Women virtual event fun, memorable and thought-provoking. A quick trivia icebreaker at the beginning sets the right tone to help us get into the mindset of why these stories matter, and a reflection activity at the end allows us to think about our own place in history. A more collaborative activity in the middle required more experimentation to make it just right for different audiences. For team-building events, small groups compete to write a haiku inspired by one of the badass women. In larger groups or on the public events, the whole audience works together to compose the haiku in real time! Either way, it’s a fun “brain break” that gets the creative juices flowing and helps us connect with the stories on a deeper level.

We are extremely excited to share this virtual experience. In the events we’ve done so far, it has been a total thrill to hear my guests reflect on what they learned and tell me which stories resonated with them the most. We are proud of this virtual event! While Women’s History Month is coming to a close soon, this virtual team building event can be booked for any time of year.

– Marie Rowley, Marketing Manager and Event Host

We Want to Curate the Best Virtual Experiences about Chicago

Alex — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 16:26:00 +0000

When I wrote for the Chicago Detours blog last spring, it was about our “temporary transition” to offering virtual experiences. Months later, virtual experiences are both our present and future. We’d like to share here how we have successfully transformed a walking tour company into a virtual events company. We put our creative minds together along with our decade of doing tours for conferences, corporate groups and universities in order to tackle these new challenges with some awesome results.

We hope you can join is in the next few weeks for our Virtual Holiday Stories Happy Hour. We spent hundreds of hours researching and refining this fun, interactive virtual experience that celebrates Chicago’s many holiday season traditions. And our knockout event for 2010 is Badass Women of History. We will offer it to the public a few times during March, which is Women’s History Month. And it is always bookable for a private team-building activity that explores diversity and inclusion.

Creating Content

We spent April working out our approach to storytelling and presentations and then our team of five put the pedal to the metal. We had figured out what platform we wanted to offer these events, and we went with the new industry standard (Zoom).

We quickly found that the live format (versus a recording) made it exciting. People could comment in real-time, making the presentation a two-way street. It brought people together in a shared experience, and therefore combated quarantine loneliness. Our virtual events were enormously more popular than we’d imagined, and we were getting 200-300 guests with minimal marketing. People were showing up to every one, and inviting friends to join.

Nearly every day of the week had a virtual tour or “Historic Happy Hour,” all of which were original creations. We relied on the deep well of information and stories that we had developed over 10 years as a tour company, but it was still a ton of work.

Creating dozens and dozens of unique virtual tours meant hours of research, editing, presentation refinement, fact-checking, and editing. Not to mention the time spent in front of the camera! We realized by the end of May that we needed to devise more structure. As “pivot” came to be the buzz word du jour, we were basically eating it for lunch every day. With no one understanding yet how long coronavirus would interrupt our normal lives, we had to take things day by day. At the same time, we were risking burnout and and we needed a bigger business strategy.

Making Quality Events

Our Marketing Manager Marie and Executive Director Amanda came up with a virtual event format that would be fun and explore all the stories and places locals don’t know that is central to what we’ve always done as a tour company. Saturday and Sunday afternoons were “neighborhood detours” that showed off unique architecture, cultural activities, and historic bars and restaurants of neighborhoods on the North, South and West sides.

For weekdays, our variety of topics included “Monday Conversations” with fellow interpreters of the city, like artists, historians, preservationists and journalists. Tuesdays were for virtual road trips to destinations within driving distance of Chicago. Wednesdays were “People’s Histories” to highlight the lesser told stories of Chicago figures from the past. Fridays were about historic bars and old-school entertainment like theater.

My personal favorite was Thursdays: our Chicago Architecture Crash Course. Amanda and I planned, researched, and co-presented a 12-week long series of presentations on the different periods and styles of the city’s grand architectural traditions. It was honestly one of the most gratifying things I’ve ever done for Detours and it was thrilling to see a regular audience join us week after week.

This collage expresses just a few of the many topics we tackled on virtual tours. (Collage by Alex Bean)

Making Virtual Experiences Interactive

We weren’t the only tour or events company that jumped online during the onset of the pandemic. From the get-go, we stayed on top of what other museums, theaters, event planners and tour companies were creating for virtual experiences. We noticed that the experiences improved when they provided some level of interactivity. Plenty of tour companies were giving historic lectures, but just as in our tours, we wanted to engage and connect people.

We were also motivated by missing the interactivity of our walking tours. Our walking and bus tours had quick moments for fun and educational games. With our in-person tours, we have worked with thousands over the years for corporate team building experiences. We know that people love to be competitive, they love to learn, and they want to show off their creativity. So the team took our 10 years of designing games and considered how we could build those games in a virtual format. We started to brainstorm ways that we could make an experience interactive without fancy technology, but rather 100% human interaction brought to you via a Zoom event.

The whole team worked together in the design process to make a product that would appeal to corporate groups and conferences. We made a “Boat Tour Bingo” for the Cruise from Your Couch Virtual Boat Tours. We crafted a sheet of clues, each relating to sights and stories that we glimpse on that hour-long digital excursion. The game adds a layer of friendly competition to an already fun experience, with prizes for the winners to boot!

We also devised what we call “creative challenges.” For our Deep Slice of Chicago Food History, we explore how the various cultures of Chicago have shaped our unique cuisine. So we then have our corporate event clients collaborate in breakout rooms to create their own new signature dish that reflects our cultural history (and also tastes good!) We choose our favorites and then have the group vote for the winner!

Refining our Virtual Experiences

Images like this, from the Virtual Boat Tour, have given us a baseline to build from. Image courtesy of Google.

We then refined our virtual events, in terms of both quantity and presentation. It is an awful lot of work to create new content all the time! It was both a creatively stimulating process and an exhausting one. We narrowed down a few core virtual event products that we could make awesome and present regularly.

Our Virtual Boat Tour was an obvious inclusion as it was popular from the get-go. The boat tour virtual event got press coverage in Block Club Chicago, NBC, the Tribune, Fodor’s, Thrillist, and Time Out Chicago, We also selected virtual events dedicated to Chicago’s food and drink histories, the wonders of the 1893 World’s Fair, and the badass women of Chicago’s history. We’re constantly working to finesse the stories we tell and locate killer images for these virtual events. We’ve had video produced, too! We want our virtual guests get an unmatched experience.

We now specialize in virtual events for private clients, like universities, families, and corporate teams. We have hosted conferences as well as the entire incoming class of the University of Chicago. I’ve personally hosted virtual tours for every one of those groups and it’s a richly rewarding experience. I love sharing the city’s stories with people who still cannot see it (and each other) for themselves.

The past few months’ of doing virtual events for more than 27,000 guests shows we have this whole virtual event thing down! We have taken our knowledge of architecture and history with our expertise in storytelling and team building for in-person tours and applied this to our virtual events. Like I said, I hope you can join us for the Virtual Holiday Stories Happy Hour this December!

– Alex Bean, Content Manager and Virtual Event Host

2020 Shop Local Gift Guide from Chicago Detours

Alex — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 22:24:45 +0000

We’ve made it through a year unlike any other and hope to help you ring it out in good cheer with our 2020 Shop Local Gift Guide. Our staff searched high and low for unique gift ideas for Chicagoans near and far. We strove to highlight local neighborhood stores – including our own new store! Hopefully the 2020 Shop Local Gift Guide helps make picking presents a bit easier for you and yours!

‘Tis the season to shop, and we encourage you to support your local businesses this holiday season. Many are under great strain after 9 months of Covid and Amazon is doing just fine anyway.

We research Chicago history and architecture like this while developing our live virtual events and custom corporate events. Join us for our public virtual events or book an exclusive team-building event for your private group. We can also create custom tours and original content creation about this Chicago topic and countless others.

#1. Write Your Own Story with the Badass Women Journal

Our Badass Women Journal is now on sale in our online store. We designed this booklet for the freaking fantastic folks blazing trails to a better tomorrow.

The 52-page Badass Journal has blank pages along with vibrant watercolor illustrations and the backstories of eight badass women – like Bessie Coleman, who was the first licensed Black pilot, or Maria Tallchielf, who was America’s first prima ballerina. The blank sheets of this journal are great for notes, reflective writing, or drawings. Some of them have inspiring quotes by well-known heroes like Ida B. Wells and Michelle Obama.

#2. Share the Season on the Virtual Holiday Stories Happy Hour

That special event for the holidays that I just mentioned It’s a ton of fun. We crafted this year’s Virtual Holiday Stories Happy Hour to be the perfect substitute for the family get-togethers and shopping excursions we can’t partake in right now.

The hour-long virtual event is a fun, safe, and interactive way to discover Chicago holiday traditions, both famous and forgotten. Our co-hosts will regale guests with stories, while guests get to participate in contests, storytelling, and even more fun!

#3. Piece Together the City with the Neon Neighborhoods Map Puzzle

Transit Tees has become a staple feature of our annual shop local gift guide. To quote our Marketing Manager Marie, “Well, they keep making great shit.” Indeed, they do!

This year, we’re highlighting their daunting Neon Neighborhood Map of Chicago. This 1,000 piece challenge will surely keep local geography and puzzle aficionados busy during our stay-at-home winter.

#4. Show Your Local Pride with Prints from The Chicago Neighborhoods

Speaking of neighborhoods! Chicago, as we have mentioned before, is a city of neighborhoods. Right now, we dearly miss getting to see and experience all those distinctive neighborhood, so we turn to the magnificent artwork from The Chicago Neighborhoods. They make beautiful posters, prints, and t-shirts in the iconic WPA style. A poster that show off this muscular, mystical city’s distinctive boroughs could help enliven someone’s new home office.

Bury me with that South Loop poster, by the way.

#5. Pick up a Book and Some Swag from Pilsen Community Books

Pilsen Community Books is a local reader’s dream. Photo by Alex Bean.

The 2020 Shop Local Gift Guide initially didn’t have any bookstore entries, which was obviously unacceptable and out of character for us. So onto the list goes Pilsen Community Books! They have been one of our favorite local indie bookshops since it opened in 2016. They became an employee-owned cooperative earlier this year, instantly making them a singular presence in Chicago’s literary scene. Their collection of new and used books is vast and their ACAB (Always Carry a Book) merch is the best sloganeering I’ve seen in years.

If you’re looking for a recent title by a local author, the Chicago book of the year seems to be Gabriel Bump’s Everywhere You Don’t Belong. A coming of age story about growing up Black in Chicago, it’s been showing up in year-end lists and picking up debut writer awards.

#6. Put the City on Your Wall with a Hand-Cut Chicago Road Map

Image courtesy of Erin Van Fleet.

Maps are de riegeur decor for many Chicagoans, but the same prints from the safe gift shops can be a little passé. We recommend putting our famous city’s grid on your wall with a Mini Framed Hand-Cut Chicago Road Map. These hand-cut wooden maps are all handmade, making each one individual and unique. That’ll be sure to set you apart from the Chads and Trixies on the block.

#7. Tell Someone in Your Life that They Kick Butt with a “You Are a Badass” Bracelet

We love celebrating the badass women of Chicago’s history in our journal (see at top), virtual events (in March 2021!), past live events, and writing. They’re the fierce female powerhouses that have made our city great. If there’s a badass woman in your life that deserves similar celebration, then gift them a “You Are a Badass” Bracelet along with our Badass Women Journal! The cold rub of metal against their wrist will be a constant reminder of the cold fire in their heart, fueling their badass life. Buy before 12/10 with code DETOUR for 10% off and an extra 5% to your chosen charity.

#8. Rediscover the City with the Chicago Architecture Crash Course

Chicago Detours offered dozens of regular virtual tours and events in the early days of the pandemic and, honestly, they were pretty fantastic. The ones we’re proudest of are the 12-part Chicago Architecture Crash Course. We ran this as a live, weekly series throughout the summer, but made sure to record the sessions.

You can gift the rental of the Architecture Crash Course and your dad, mom, lover, or sibling can watch them on their own schedule. You or your gift recipient will delve into the big topics and specific details that make our city’s architecture so spectacular.

#9. Decorate with Art from the Lillstreet Gallery

Image courtesy of the Lillstreet Art Center.

The Lillstreet Gallery, in Ravenswood, is a collection of artists working in “ceramics, textiles, photography, painting, drawing, metalsmithing and more.” You can support these local artists by ordering one of their delicate works for your own home. Lillstreet also offers online classes, in case you want to bust a mold. Ya know, like…like “bust a move.” But with a ceramics mold.

Alright, I will see myself out.

#10. Enjoy some Virtual Cinema from the Music Box

Image via Wikimedia.

The movie industry, understandably, has seen its audience decimated by the pandemic. Happily, you can still support one of the most iconic movie theaters in Chicago history before a vaccine arrives. The Music Box Theater is offering Virtual Cinema streaming options, so your money goes to one of the best theaters in the world and not Jeff Bezos. You can even listen to the famous Music Box organ before starting the film!

#11. Support an Arts Non-Profit

Traditional gift-giving is great, but we also love encouraging atypical ways of showing you care. We’ve long been advocates for and supporters of the arts here in Chicago. So we’re encouraging you to donate to an arts-centric non-profit like the Chicago Artists Coalition or our friends at the Albany Park Theater Project. Charitable gifts like this enable striving artists all across Chicago to continue making this a city known for its art and culture. The Council for Arts Education has a list of local and state arts groups that will surely be happy to hear from you.

#12. Ship or Snack on Gluten-free Treats from Ms. P’s

Bringing a plate of cookies over to grandma’s house can’t happen this year, but shipping treats and recipes can be a sweet replacement. We recommend making an order from Ms. P’s Gluten-free, a local, Black woman-owned baked goods company. Their delicious dishes are carried at chains like Whole Foods and can help cheer up any kitchen counter.

#13. Eat Like a Local with Tastes of Chicago

Image via Wikimedia.

Ordering delivery from your favorite Chicago restaurant has become more common than ever this year. Still, not all of us are lucky enough to have a 312 or 773 area code. So Lou Malnati’s has put together Tastes of Chicago, which ships local fare from Chicagoland favorites like Portillo’s or Fannie May anywhere in the nation.

A frozen deep dish pizza is an upgrade for our Deep Slice of Chicago Food History Virtual Event that we offer as a corporate team-building event. We’ll help coordinate shipping a Lou Malnati’s pizza to the rest of your party. Then they can prep their deep dish pizza in time for our interactive presentation about local culinary history. Sounds like a happy holiday season to me!

#14. Grab Some Chicago Art from Glenn Galen Studios

Chicago Detours transitioned to being a virtual tour company amidst the pandemic. That means we’re all spending a lot more time at home this year. Which is nice, but has led us to miss seeing the city on a daily basis. If you’re feeling the same way, then order a painting of the city from Glenn Galen Studios. Their wide range of subjects let us choose the segment of the city to commemorate, and our Executive Director Amanda is a big fan of their impressionist style and nostalgic tone.

#15. Splurge on Virtual Event Gift Cards

Still can’t figure out exactly what gift to grab Be like all dads everywhere and snap up a gift card. Virtual Event gift cards give their bearer the chance to register for one of our frequent virtual events, like the Virtual Holiday Stories Happy Hour.

These gift cards can be also be stowed away in an inbox and saved for future events, like the Badass Women of History series in March. You can also use one to book a private virtual event, like the Virtual Holidays Stories Happy Hour that runs through the end of December

We Hope the 2020 Shop Local Gift Guide Helps!

The Chicago Detours team is very grateful for the continued opportunity to share Chicago’s amazing history and culture with all of you. We hope the ideas in the 2020 shop local gift guide can spread the joy of learning about Chicago and loving our city.

ABOUT CHICAGO DETOURS

In business since 2010, Chicago Detours is a passionate team of educators, historians and storytellers. We applied a decade of experience as one of Chicago’s top-rated tour companies to become a virtual event company in 2020. We bring curious people to explore, learn and interact about Chicago’s history, architecture and culture through custom tours, content production, and virtual events.

– Alex and the Chicago Detours Team

How to Become a Virtual Tour Events Company

Alex — Sun, 03 May 2020 05:00:00 +0000

All of the sudden Chicago Detours is temporarily a virtual tour company! It’s a new and unexpected change for our small business, as are many things for everyone right now .

We are now into a month and a half of lockdown during the COVID19 pandemic. When that was announced, it spelled a (temporary) end to our tour company business of providing walking tours and private group tours for locals and visitors. So, we had to figure out how to adapt in a real hurry. Within two weeks Chicago Detours began to offer virtual tours.

The weeks since then have been a whirlwind of planning and preparation to become a virtual tour company. Our workload is dominated by designing the tours and marketing them. We’ve gotten some great press from Chicago Tribune, Block Club, TimeOut, and NBC. That said, we’re thoroughly enjoying this new line of work and have some really exciting virtual tour topics lined up. We have a virtual boat tour of the Chicago River planned for May 9th, which is already piquing interest across town.

Zooming Through Virtual Tours

The biggest challenge in become a virtual tour company in all honesty, was not content. We have tons of stories, ideas, and facts that we have cultivated from 10 years of sharing tours, public talks, and blog articles. Our challenge as a now virtual tour company was to figure out how to bring all these stories of history, architecture and culture to people’s couches. Just like countless other small businesses, we turned to Zoom as the solution to the problems presented by social distancing.

We chose to host Zoom meetings that would run 30 minutes on weekday evenings and 50 minutes on weekday afternoons. We had to just guess at what time of day people might want to join our tours while we had been thrust into an entire disruption of regular daily schedules. Then we had to figure out: How can you create an online tour experience that replicates the distinct pleasure of walking and talking through town?

Virtual Tour Formats

On that first week, we had big swings that taught us a lot about guiding tours from an online platform. Our Executive Director, Amanda, hosted the initial couple of Historic Happy Hours and Virtual Tours.

As she led us into temporarily becoming a virtual tour company, she worked out approaches to the digital tours that we now consistently use: Google Street View, slideshow presentations, and creating an interactive dynamic through the chat functionality. The former allows us to skip up and down thoroughfares like LaSalle Street, or just regular neighborhood boulevards. Such an experience, even through a Zoom screen share, helps provide a tangible sense of the physical layout of the cityscape. The latter always us to display historical images and videos, just like we do with iPads on the walking tours.

But really, we can’t explain how fun it is to interact live with a group of 60-120 people for each of these digital experiences. We have for a limited time the videos on our Youtube channel if you’d like to see for yourself how a virtual tour works. Or, if you follow us on Facebook you can easily access the livestream.

Thanks for Supporting Us!

We’re incredibly grateful for the support that Chicago Detours has received since the lockdown began. The initial days were immensely stressful, as we reckoned with the sudden disappearance of our entire source of revenue. The online tours have not replaced our lost income. We are offering most of them for free and accepting donations to keep us afloat in the meantime. A band of “regulars” is signing in every day and new faces appear for each virtual tour. Corporate groups, families, and universities have started signing on for private virtual tours.

It means the world to draw people’s interest in these uncertain times. Your support has kept our business operating and it means the world to us. Please register for a virtual tour here!

See you on Zoom!

– Alex Bean, Content Manager and (Virtual) Tour Guide