Alter.Nation
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The Story
I got married recently on February 24th. My husband and I wanted to have a really fun wedding for our guests, and we’re both big nerds. We like games, and we like being competitive, so we wanted a bunch of games for people at the wedding to enjoy. One of the elements of that was a human bingo game, which I used Alteryx for. Human bingo involves going around and getting people to sign squares on your bingo card that apply to them to win.
I remembered an old Alteryx weekly challenge I’d enjoyed and started there. It’s a really fun challenge that uses Reporting tools to make a baseball bingo game. I modified my solution for the weekly challenge for the wedding. I came up with over 150 different items that were specific to us, our guests, and our family and friends, plus some generic items from the internet. Anything from “grew up in the same hometown as one of us” to “has known my husband or me for over 30 years” to “has played a specific video game with us” to randomly place on each square on the cards. Some might only apply to a person or two, while others were more general, like “has blue eyes.”
In addition to the randomized squares, each card was printed with game rules and the guest’s name at the bottom so you'd know which card was yours. It'd be placed at your assigned seat to serve as seat markers or place setting cards.
The workflow randomized all of the prompts, rendered each card with Reporting tools, and sorted them in order of the table number and seat position to make it easy to put them in the right spot. One of the smart things we did was create some cards without names at the bottom in case guests showed up that we weren't expecting, which ended up happening. We printed them on cardstock in our wedding colors, and they looked really nice.
I also used Alteryx to make escort cards - a display where guests grab cards with their names on them that tell them which table they’re assigned to. We generated fake cards that looked like the game Magic: the Gathering, which we both love and wanted to incorporate into the wedding.
My Alteryx workflow pulls in images of Magic: the Gathering cards, adds text with names and table numbers, sorts cards alphabetically for display, and then renders them for printing. I wrote a little macro to assign the right background colors to text in the Reporting tools for each card color. Cards were then printed on special paper and cropped.
I can't even imagine manually making these cards with every guest's name and table number; we would have messed it up, and it would have been a pain, especially just a few days before the wedding. Alteryx helped me get rid of some human error and made it look better than we could have otherwise. It was a fun way to use Alteryx several months ahead of time to build these workflows and then just have them ready to go when the seating chart was finalized.
The Impact
The human bingo game was a huge hit with our guests. It got people mingling and chatting during cocktail hour and talking to people they otherwise wouldn’t have. I got really excited while we were taking family photos seeing people coming around with their little bingo cards saying like, “oh, did you grow up in Patagonia?” or “did you work as a professional cowboy?” or “have you played Space Team?” It was a really fun moment seeing people getting into the game. Several people were having so much fun they decided to go for a full blackout (getting all the squares filled out) even after others had already won the bingo prizes. If you're having a wedding or event, I can't recommend highly enough trying something like this. Several guests told me it was one of the most fun aspects of the wedding!
Creating workflows with Alteryx months ahead of the wedding helped save time when things were getting crazy in the final days. When we had to react to the guest list and table assignment two days before the wedding, we were able to quickly re-run the workflows and generate new cards without having to spend a lot of time on it. Alteryx made generating these a breeze, even with last-minute changes to the guest list.
