Phone banking is repetitive by design. The same script, the same tone, the same waiting between calls — for hours. The campaigns that keep volunteers showing up shift after shift do not just train better. They make it fun.
Phone banking games are one of the most reliable tools a coordinator has. Research from Volunteer Canada found that programs using gamified structures saw 34% higher volunteer retention within 12 months compared to those that did not. That is not a small number when your campaign depends on people coming back next Tuesday and the Tuesday after that.
Before you try any of these, make sure your volunteers are already set up and trained on phone banking — games work best on top of a session that is already running well, not as a substitute for one.
Why phone banking games work
The problem with a long phone banking shift is not the calls themselves. It is the gaps between them — the waiting, the voicemails, the strings of unanswered rings. That is where energy drains fastest.
Games address this in two different ways. Diversion games (Scrabble, drawing, Psych) give volunteers something light to do between calls so the boredom does not compound into fatigue. Performance games and team challenges do something more interesting: they turn the call metrics your campaign is already tracking into a scoreboard. Suddenly the number of live contacts a volunteer makes is not just data in a report — it is the game.
Not every volunteer is motivated the same way. Some thrive on individual competition. Others do their best work when they are part of a group pushing toward a shared goal. A good coordinator rotates through all three types across a session.
The games below are organized accordingly: performance games, team challenges, and diversion games. Pick one from each category and you have a session structure that stays fresh from the first call to the last.
Performance games
Performance games tie the outcome directly to what your campaign cares about: live contacts made, supporter IDs recorded, calls completed. The competition is friendly, the metric is real, and the coordinator does not need a separate system to track it.
1. Shoot the Hoop
This game is similar to the one you see at carnival fairs. Each volunteer is assigned a fixed number of sponge balls (or any other type of ball, for that matter), and a basket is placed in front of each person at a fixed location. After a volunteer finishes a call, he/she gets to throw three balls into the basket.
A leaderboard is maintained and at the end of the day, the volunteer with the most number of balls in their basket wins a prize.
Simple yet fun for passing time while phone banking, no?
2. Phone Banking Bingo
Phone Banking Bingo is a community-created game that has been circulating among campaign organizers for years, and for good reason: the squares are drawn from real things that actually happen during a shift.
Each volunteer gets a bingo card with 24 squares. Sample squares include:
- Make 3 live contacts in a row
- Get hung up on
- Someone asks a policy question
- Voicemail box is full
- Wrong number
- Someone asks to volunteer
- A contact puts you on hold
- Back-to-back supporter IDs
- Call goes to a fax machine
First volunteer to complete a row calls it out and wins a small prize. The coordinator resets the cards and runs another round mid-shift to keep the energy going.
Works in-person (print the cards before the session) and virtually (share as a Google Sheet each volunteer keeps open in a separate tab). A community version of the 24-square card exists at bingobaker.com for coordinators who want a ready-made template.
3. First to Five
First volunteer to reach 5 live contacts — actual conversations, not just dials — wins a small prize. The coordinator tracks progress on the CallHub leaderboard or a whiteboard visible to the room.
The key mechanic is the reset. Run this game in 30 to 45-minute windows rather than across the whole shift. A shorter window gives slower callers a realistic shot at winning the next round, and it keeps the competitive energy from fading into resignation halfway through the session. Multiple winners across a shift is a better outcome than one dominant volunteer and six people who stopped trying.
Works in-person and virtually. For virtual sessions, the coordinator announces the live count in the group channel every 20 minutes.
Team challenges
Not every volunteer is energized by individual competition. Team challenges give the whole group a shared stake in the outcome, which means even a quieter volunteer who would never top an individual leaderboard is part of something that wins.
2. Passing the Parcel
This one is the fun game we have all played at birthday parties when we were kids. A volunteer and an object are chosen at random. When that volunteer starts their call, the object is passed among the others. When the call is finished, the person holding the object is the loser.
Then another volunteer is chosen and the game is repeated again. If you wish, keep a scoresheet to see who has the most and least losses. The former would then have to treat the latter.
4. Table vs. Table
Split volunteers into two groups — two tables in an in-person setting, or two breakout threads for a virtual session. Each group races to reach 20 live contacts. First group there wins a collective prize.
The coordinator picks the prize before the session starts: choice of music for the next 20 minutes, first pick from the snack table, a shout-out on the campaign Slack channel. Keep it small and public. The announcement matters as much as the reward.
This format works well for coordinators who are managing sessions with a wide range in volunteer experience. A newer caller contributes the same as a seasoned one toward the group total, which means the game does not become a spectator sport for people who are still finding their rhythm.
5. Milestone Unlock
The whole room works toward one number. When total supporter IDs recorded in the session hit 50, everyone gets a 10-minute early break. When they hit 100, the coordinator orders pizza or posts a campaign-wide win announcement.
The coordinator announces the running total every 30 minutes — not just at the end. That announcement is the heartbeat of the game. A room that knows they are at 38 supporter IDs and needs 12 more to unlock the break will dig in in a way that a room sitting in silence waiting for the shift to end simply will not.
CallHub’s real-time dashboard shows total contacts, supporter IDs, and dispositions across all volunteers simultaneously, which means the coordinator is reading the actual campaign number rather than doing manual math. The milestone scoreboard builds itself.
Diversion games
Diversion games exist between calls. They are not tied to call metrics and they do not have a campaign outcome attached. Their job is simpler: give volunteers something genuinely fun to do in the gaps so the waiting does not compound into fatigue.
3. Misplacement
When a volunteer goes for a bathroom break or simply to stretch his/her legs, the other volunteers either:
- Misplace an item on the missing person’s desk
- Add a new item to the desk
- Leave the desk unchanged
When the volunteer returns, they have to figure out if anything is different and what it is that is different. Of course, it goes without saying that the people who actually do the misplacing are not on phone banking at that moment.
4. Draw the recipient
Each volunteer after making a call (or during, if they can multitask) takes a couple of minutes and draws or doodles how they think the recipient looks. The volunteer is at complete freedom to decide which recipient to draw.
At the end of the day, all the drawings are collected and matched with that recipient’s profile. A vote is conducted and the artist whose drawing is voted most similar to what the recipient might look like wins.
5. Psych!
A fun online game, its main objective is to type in misleading answers to a particular question, deceiving others into selecting that answer. After each round, there is a brief window of time where the game waits for everyone to join.
So if a volunteer happens to be on a call, they can finish it and then join that round. Psych is perfect for driving boredom away, and with the hilarious answers that can crop up, is pretty entertaining too.
6. Quizup
This online quizzing game lets volunteers challenge each other on trivia. When not on a call, or during a break, volunteers can play with and interact with each other.
Volunteers can also form a group of their own and maintain a leaderboard, to see who is the sharpest of the lot.
7. Scrabble
For the word-loving volunteers, online Scrabble is always an option to test vocabulary. Somewhat similar to a self-formed crossword puzzle, this game is a reliable way to pass time during breaks or bouts of boredom.
Adapting games for virtual phone banks
Most phone banks in 2026 are either fully virtual or hybrid. A few games in this list are in-person only — here is how to navigate that.
Performance games translate cleanly to virtual. Phone Banking Bingo works as a shared Google Sheet. First to Five is tracked on the CallHub leaderboard, which the coordinator can display on a shared screen or announce in the group channel. Shoot the Hoop is in-person only and does not adapt well remotely — swap it for First to Five instead.
Team challenges need a coordination channel to work virtually. Set up a Slack or WhatsApp thread before the session and use it for coordinator updates, live counts, and group announcements. Table vs. Table runs as two separate threads — each group tracks its own count and reports in. Milestone Unlock needs the coordinator to post running totals in the main channel every 30 minutes. The group energy builds through the channel the same way it would through a room.
Diversion games are already digital or need no adaptation. Psych, Quizup, and Scrabble work identically in-person and virtually. Misplacement and Draw the Recipient are in-person only — skip both for remote sessions.
Using CallHub analytics to run the games
The performance games and team challenges in this list all depend on one thing: visible numbers. A volunteer who cannot see the live count does not feel the competition. A room that does not know it is 12 supporter IDs away from unlocking a break does not push for it.
CallHub’s campaign leaderboard shows every volunteer’s live call count and contact rate on a single screen. The coordinator does not need a whiteboard or a spreadsheet. First to Five and Table vs. Table track themselves. The coordinator’s job is to announce the numbers, not calculate them.
The campaign dashboard shows total contacts, supporter IDs recorded, undecideds, and refused across all volunteers in real time. That is the Milestone Unlock scoreboard. Set your milestone number before the session opens, pull up the dashboard, and announce progress every 30 minutes. When the number hits, everyone in the room knows before you say a word.
For coordinators managing phone bank volunteers across a full session, the combination of the leaderboard and the dashboard is also a coaching tool. A volunteer with a high dial count but a low contact rate might be rushing through conversations. A volunteer who has been idle for 15 minutes needs a check-in. The data is there — the games just give it a second use.
See how the leaderboard and live reporting work at callhub.io/platform/phone-banking/.
Volunteer milestone rewards: a note on recognition
The games above have built-in prizes and outcomes. But a coordinator who only recognizes the winner of each game misses most of the opportunity.
Research cited by Volunteer Canada suggests milestone-based recognition — separate from who wins a given game — increases volunteer return rates by 23%. Acknowledging a specific effort matters more than acknowledging a result.
Some low-cost milestones worth calling out during a session:
- First supporter ID of the night: public shout-out in the room or the group channel
- 10 live contacts in a single shift: a coffee card or campaign sticker
- First time a new volunteer completes a full hour on the phones: acknowledge it by name
- 50 total calls made by an individual across multiple sessions: a campaign swag item
None of these require a budget. Most require about 30 seconds of the coordinator’s attention. For more ideas on recognizing your volunteers between sessions, see volunteer appreciation — the same principles apply inside a shift.
The best phone banks feel less like a grind and more like a shared sprint toward something that matters. Any of these games can be dropped into a session with no preparation — pick one performance game, one team challenge, and one diversion game and rotate them across the shift.
Use CallHub’s leaderboard to keep the numbers visible and the energy up. The rest takes care of itself.
Learn more about phone banking software or read the full guide to managing phone bank volunteers.
