How to run a Drive-Thru Easter Egg Hunt
In a world where the pandemic threw some of our favorite memory-making events out the window, we decided to make the best of an unusual situation. We came up with a new way of doing an Easter Egg Hunt for our community and it absolutely took off last year! We’ve been getting requests from around the country about how it works.
Here are 10 things to consider while planning your own Drive-Thru Easter Egg Hunt.
A parking lot: make sure you only take up parking spaces that your Pastor is willing to lose on Sunday morning. We run our Hunts for 6 days (Monday-Saturday) but you will need time to set it up so you will lose parking spaces on a Sunday.
Hidden Objects: We had someone cut Easter Eggs (or whatever you’re hiding) out of plywood and paint them with waterproof paint. Each Egg ranged from 1foot tall to 3 feet tall. Then we placed a vinyl number on each egg and added a clear coat so it was waterproof.
Decor: everything needs to be WATERPROOF. We brought in 10 yards of bark, 200 sq feet of sod, 6 8foot long wooden free standing fences, we borrowed 50 plants from a local nursery, blue plastic table cloths to create a pond, multi-colored plastic tablecloths cut into strips and hung like streamers from the trees, medium-size river rock, large rounds of wood, and then anything we could find around the church like an old play structure, a zipline, a large wooden cable reel, a couple of wine barrels, small orange soccer cones, fake greenery, random colored fabric, etc. Our goal was to make it look like Peter Rabbit's garden.
Prizes: we partnered with a local ice cream shop. Made a deal on the price of each cone and paid the ice cream shop at the end of the Event.
Signage: you need a welcome sign, directional signs for the lines of cars, a rule sign, a sign at the end to “Text in for the Prize” or “Circle back through if you didn’t find them all,” and we added little signs along with the hunt with questions like “have you found all 50 eggs?”
Volunteers: we only staffed one volunteer at the very beginning who stood 6 feet from the cars and welcomed everyone and gave a hint on the first egg so they knew what they were looking for.
Extras: we didn’t pass out maps, or checklists because covid was very unknown in April 2020, but I would have loved an app they could scan and check off the eggs as they found them.
Music: We had a large sign printed with a QR code. Families would scan it and it would bring them to our Spotify channel for music in the car. The only issue is that we needed Spotify. Other options are available for music.
Set up: the Eggs were hidden in chronological order, but if number 1 was on the right side of the street, likely number 2 was on the left. Two eggs were hidden high in the trees. And One egg could only be found if you drove past it and looked backward out of a window:)
Winning: if a child drove through the Hunt & found all 50 eggs, they could text “winner” to “474747” and a coupon for free ice cream would be sent to their parent’s phone. Each coupon was good for one cone for each child in the car. This was for sure the honor system, but we didn’t care too much as it was a way for us to meet the community. *We went through a paid texting app to do this. This was our covid cautious system, however now you could probably print physical coupons and give one to each child in the car. The Ice cream shop would then collect those coupons and you would pay them based on the number.
We hope these 10 things help you design the best Drive-Thru Egg Hunt possible! Our prayer is that your Drive-Thru Egg Hunt would ultimately serve as a way for you and your church community to reach the yet-to-believe!
If you have further questions, you can email our Kids Pastor, Jen at jens@vintagegrace.org.
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