People who enjoy trivia games and television programs might want to check out Lunch Time Trivia on the Facebook page of the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park to test their Civil War era knowledge.
From Friday through Monday at around 11 a.m., the park posts a multiple choice question and asks page visitors to answer the question. Later in the afternoon, the answer with a historical description is posted.
The primary park employee behind the trivia challenge is Chris Bingham, who posts the questions and answers. Bingham has been employed as a permanent park guide since 2017 but has been with the park in various capacities since 2002. He is also the park’s social media coordinator.
Lunch Time Trivia has been ongoing on Facebook since the COVID-19 pandemic mandates shut down the park in the spring of 2020. Bingham said he came up with the idea from Twitter’s #triviatuesday and a prior similar game used by the park on its Twitter account.
“One of my predecessors named Jacob Ross, who was a seasonal park guide here, really was more into the social media at that time a couple years ago than I was, and he started doing it. So, I just kind of took up where he left off,” Bingham said.
The trivia game is not currently used on Twitter because the participation level is much less than on Facebook. However, Bingham said he might give Twitter another chance in the future.
Working as a park guide, Bingham keeps up on his Civil War reading, and that’s where he comes up with many of his trivia questions, as well as a variety of other sources.
“They’re things I’ve either seen in reading for part of my job from Civil War books, from things related to the Appomattox campaign and the surrender. Sometimes they are questions that visitors have asked or that were covered in a talk or program that I gave,” he said.
Bingham collaborates with co-workers in the park’s Education and Visitor Service department but comes up with most of the trivia questions himself. Sometimes coming up with new trivia questions each day is a challenge, but Bingham said it’s a fun challenge.
The questions used to be posted five days a week but have been cut down to four. Public interaction typically ranges from 25 to 60, according to Bingham — and public interaction is what the park is aiming for on their social media accounts, as Chief of Education and Visitor Services Beth Parnicza explained.
“One of our key goals for social media is to get folks to be engaged with our content, not just reading it and preferably not just giving us a “like” — although we hope they “like” it — we really are excited by having comments and having people reading and talking about and thinking about the content that we’re posting,” she said. “So, engagement like we have in trivia with folks actually guessing or tagging their friends to guess, that’s the sort of response that we’re looking for, and it’s the way that we can get folks to invest in our story from across the country.”
Lunch Time Trivia is one tool the park has used on social media to maintain the interest of the public during the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions, as well as increasing the amount of informative daily posts.
“Once we realized that we had to curtail our operations and then close, we realized that our best outreach to the world was through social media,” Parnicza said.
Parnicza is impressed with Bingham’s wide variety of questions and believes the trivia gives the park’s Facebook page a nice balance by adding a daytime fun break to go along with its’ more serious posts.
“(Bingham) asks all kinds of different questions,” she said. “He’s sort of figured out what people will respond to — if the question is too hard, then nobody responds because they don’t know; if it’s too easy, then it’s no fun (because) everybody knows it. So, he’s sort of navigating that middle ground to get folks to participate and have fun and learn things.”
To view Lunch Time Trivia, visit the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park Facebook page. For more information on the park, call 434-352-8987 or visit www.nps.gov/apco.
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