Hackathon: What you need to know
What you need to get started; learn from my mistakes.
Planning to organize and facilitate a hackathon? Never did anything like this before? I’ve got you covered. Here are my lessons learned and what I think you need to get started.
I planned, organized and facilitated a social impact hackathon in Bali in April, 2017 in one month. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone, but I was able to pull it off with a great team and an amazing community.
What you need to get started
- Understand your theme and know how to market it to get the participants you want. We didn’t necessary need programmers, but other people assumed that’s what we wanted for participants and therefore felt unqualified to join. It wasted a lot of time and stress trying to change our marketing halfway through advertising the event.
- The most detailed internal schedule you can create. I can’t emphasis enough how this will come in handy when you have 20 people asking you different organizational questions during the event. Here’s an example of what we started with. This includes everything from where do we set up chairs to when do the food sponsors need to arrive. I held that printed schedule like it was my baby and it never left my side.
- A place to host the event. This goes without saying that you can’t do much if you don’t have a good venue.
- Have a way for people to pay and sign up. Please, for your own sake, pick the most simple route. Eventbrite works best in most countries. This would have saved us so much stress to have this figured out at the beginning.
- Confirmation email with all the details. People want to get excited about the event (and also want to make sure their application went through.)
- Initial pitch info guidelines. Give this to them on Day 1 (or even in the confirmation email) so they can start prepping their initial pitches and ideas. It also helps them feel more prepared for the event and this will make them more excited.
- Final pitch info guidelines, examples and tips.
- Judging Criteria. This is for the judges AND the participants. The participants need to know what they will be judged on and it needs to be given to them in their participant package on Day 1 (or sooner).
- Photographer and videographer. Did it happen if no one saw it? But seriously, this stuff matters more than you know.
- Good judges and mentors. We got really lucky with ours! They understood what we were trying to do and dedicated their weekend to help coach the participants and judge the presentations with great care (and hearty debate).
- Banners, pendants, and name tags on brand. These look amazing in the marketing photos and makes the event feel more professional and special.
- Food Sponsors. Having communicative, reliable and delicious food sponsors was key to making this event a success. People said it’s what made them feel special and taken care of. It also made my life less stressful that we had good food that came on time.
- Good communication with and appreciation for all staff/volunteers involved. This weekend is so hard on everyone. Staff are doing their normal workload, plus all the hackathon extras. Volunteers are dedicating their time/effort this event. Reward their hard work with a small gift or bonus. It might sound like a small thing, but it’s huge for them. And they deserve the appreciation; you couldn’t have pulled it off without them.
- Have next steps outlined and ready to execute. People want and deserve to know what is happening next with all their hard work. Do you have potential sponsors to build out their projects? Follow up mentor sessions? Another hackathon planned to build off what you’ve learned? A way for everyone to keep in touch? These are all suggestions, but please have something lined up. (A facebook group for all the participants to post into and keep in touch with each other is gold. People love sharing and connecting; organize a space to do that for them.)
What I would have done differently
- Given myself more time to plan.
- Had a checklist of what I needed to do. I honestly committed to organize/run this hackathon without really understanding what needed to be done. I spent a lot of time scrambling and trying to figure it out. I ended up wasting a lot of time.
- Acted more confident in my organizing/facilitating skills. This was my first time doing an event this big/extensive and I was very insecure about whether I would do a good job. This invited people to question me, offer suggestions and one person even tried to get me to hire her to take over and facilitate it for me. I would have saved a lot of heartache if I had showed a confident front and then had mentors behind the scenes helping me work through my insecurities.
- Had more team meetings with staff and volunteers. We had complaints from staff after the stress from the weekend. They felt they weren’t looped in on the process enough and didn’t get the chance to ask lingering questions. That left them feeling confused and dumped on. It’s not enough to personally know what’s happening if you’re entire team isn’t onboard as well.
- Understand what will happen after the hackathon. I was so excited and passionate about the idea to hold the hackathon, I naively didn’t plan for what follow up was needed after the hackathon. The winning team asked for help with resources to build out their solution, other participants asked for contact info for the community projects so they could volunteer, and pretty much everyone wanted to know what the next steps were. What were we going to do with this information we learned? How would it get applied? I wasn’t prepared for this and it overwhelmed me. All of this could have gone smoother if I had a post-hackathon plan from the beginning. It shows respect for the hard work the participants put into the weekend to know what’s happening with their solutions. Bottom line: have a next steps plan before you start executing anything.
I hope all of this helps you in your quest to do a hackathon. They are hard work, but they’re worth it. If you want a more detailed plan of execution, I wrote up my step-by-step of how I organized the hackathon here.