Making Your Hackathon A Success: Planning
Creating a truly successful hackathon is about understanding what makes for an experience that’s not only productive but also genuinely fun and engaging. A well-run hackathon doesn't just deliver results during the event; it sparks connections, generates inspiring projects, builds lasting goodwill within the community, and even launches businesses. While having a great topic, fantastic participants, and appealing prizes are important, building something really successful takes thoughtful planning around three major questions:
- What does your organization want from the hackathon?
- What do your participants want from the experience?
- How do you get participants engaging with each other?
These questions help ensure that your hackathon’s content, execution, and follow-through align with the needs of your organization and community. It sounds silly at first – people participate to win prizes – but consider that most participants in any given hackathon will not receive a prize. They’ll be putting in effort and deserve reward for that effort; even if they don’t "win" they should leave with something. That something can maybe be a new project but most often is new connections and a deeper sense of belonging.
What Does the Organization Want?
Answering what your organization wants can be difficult to tease out. Ask 5 stakeholders and you might get 7 different answers. Your job is to tease out what is important, actionable, and achievable.
Understanding the needs of your organization will help set topic of the hackathon. Are you hoping to generate innovative projects using your products? Identify solid business use cases in existing industries? Or make the world a better place through open source? Make sure it’s something realistic and beneficial to your organization.
Next pick a goal, whether it’s awareness, growth, or community building; but don’t focus on the outcome. Instead focus on how you will get there. Think about what you want:
- Awareness? Identify communities to tell about your hackathon. Find key figures who can advocate, judge, or amplify.
- Growth? Find categories of projects that are easy for participants to accomplish quickly. Judge for the idea and delivery.
- High quality projects? Set high quality goals and standards. Make sure you have experts available to support. Judge for quality and usability.
- Community building? Set coopetition bonuses and recognize contributions – more on this later.
It’s easy to say you want all of these things. To some degree yes you can cover a lot in a single hackathon. However you still need to choose your most important goal and make it clear as it will guide both the design and execution of the hackathon.
Overly broad goals make it difficult for participants to determine direction. For example a hackathon that requires all new people (awareness), to deliver high quality projects, quickly (growth) is going to result in a lot of new, confused users, attempting to run before they walk.
Do outreach that reaches the right skill level and time commitment. Make sure participants have the ability to succeed. This is the north star of your hackathon and it makes sure that participants are aligned to the purpose of the hackathon and there’s follow-through from the community.
Think of the alignment of the north star like this: Something simple with a lot of seasoned professionals will see participants getting bored. Something complex with a lot of newcomers will have people leaving in frustration.
What Does the Community Want?
Simply put: what are people already using your software for? Are they building e-commerce shops, working with clients, launching startups, tackling complex data analysis, or powering research projects? Understanding this is the key to getting people excited about participating.
This will further hone your alignment. Sometimes hackathons should simply give people the opportunity to expand their skills and knowledge in a new, and fun context. Imagine a hackathon for web designers except they must use some of the most cutting edge CSS features that they'd never touch at work. Or one for backend developers who need to do micro-optimizations to deliver data as fast (or reliably) as possible.
Other times hackathons can align in the opposite direction: Have your participants expand their skills by doing something so different from their everyday that it can't help but captivate their imagination. I ran a hackathon like this at Wix once where participants needed to make a video game on Wix. It resulted in projects that I didn't even think were possible.
Ultimately it’s important that participants aren't solely motivated by prizes at the end of the event. Many participants won’t receive a prize, fewer will get a prize that is equivalent to the time invested, and some will unfortunately not realize a project. Participants need to be motivated by the experience of the event itself. The experience itself should be the reward.
Of course you want to see some awesome projects but your main goal out of any hackathon is enjoyment, it is fun, it is bonding, it is learning, and personal growth. Plan your hackathon well and you'll end up with two types of proof:
- Projects which are the physical proof.
- Happy former participants who are the social proof.
Achieve both of these and the hackathon will continue to reap rewards for your products and community long after it has finished.
Strengthening Bonds
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, no hackathon will be successful without coopetition. Coopetition is about creating an atmosphere where participants welcome, help, and support each other. Some may want to help, others may want to give and receive feedback, some like to be cheerleaders, and still others might just want to hack and not engage at all. You just need to make sure to give participants enough freedom and incentives to make participation worthwhile.
Some practical activities can include:
- Hosting live feedback sessions to give advice on projects from the community and the Developer Relations team
- Rewarding extra points for soliciting, receiving, and implementing feedback on their projects from other participants
- Giving out bonus prizes to those users who most helped others
There’s plenty of other ways too and you can certainly cater them to your specific community. These suggestions are just a starting point and they also tie into what your organization and community wants out of the hackathon. More awareness? Have them solicit feedback on social media. Strengthening the community? Give out bonus prizes for helping each other.
Remember, this isn’t something that can be simply stated in the rules: “remember we’re all in this together”. Such statements may be good for setting expectations but they ultimately convey very little and motivate even less. As the adage goes: actions speak louder than words.
No matter what you do though make sure to recognize contributors. Recognize. Recognize. Recognize. Often simple acknowledgement is the greatest reward for the honoree and motivator for everyone else.
Putting It All Together
In summary, make sure that when planning your hackathon you are meeting the needs of both your organization and community. You need both to succeed. So make a plan, setup your hackathon, execute, and follow-through to create a hackathon that isn’t just fun in the moment but endures in many facets of your community well into the future.
Thanks for reading! I’ll dive deeper into setup, execution, and follow through in future posts. Setup will cover the practical steps involved in preparing for a hackathon. Execution will give practical advice for managing everything once it gets started – even the hiccups. Follow-through will be all about keeping the hackathon’s spirit alive weeks, months, and maybe even years down the road. So subscribe if you’re interested for this and plenty of other advice on building DevRel success in your organization.
And as an extra thanks for reading all the way I leave you with this photo of my dog enjoying the snow.
