Making Your Hackathon A Success: Setup

Welcome back to my series on orchestrating a successful hackathon! If you missed my first installment on the crucial planning phase, I encourage you to check that out as well.

Now that you have defined your hackathon's theme, identified your target participants, and clarified the primary goals, it's time to build the framework. In this stage, we’ll transform your high-level concepts into detailed blueprints. While it may be tempting to jump straight into execution, investing time here is essential. A well-defined structure ensures a smooth, fair, and engaging experience for everyone involved. Answering these critical questions now will prevent confusion later and demonstrate a high level of professionalism to your participants.

We’ll be covering how to set rules that participants will follow, choosing judging criteria and judges that both is and feels fair, how to create a prize structure (it’s more than just money!), and identifying the right channels to promote your hackathon.

Rules and Submission Criteria

Every hackathon needs a clear set of rules. These range from straightforward codes of conduct to more nuanced guidelines on technical implementation. Effective rulemaking for a hackathon is less about setting restrictive boundaries and more about establishing positive requirements.

Boundaries work well for social guidelines: be respectful, collaborate with integrity, and do not plagiarize. However, for submission, negative boundaries ("do not use framework Z") are difficult to enforce and can stifle creativity. The landscape of tools and technologies is vast and it’s impossible to anticipate every scenario. For example, banning library Z might inadvertently prevent a team from using a tool that depends on library Z and closing off a development path before it can even be explored. Development tends to be very literal, and having negative boundaries tends to raise uncertainty in participants and increase churn.

Instead, phrase your technical rules in the positive to guide participants toward your goals. For instance: "All projects must use Library X," or "Submissions must be deployed on Platform Y." Most importantly, this approach channels creative energy toward the desired outcomes, providing a clear direction without limiting innovation or discouraging novel solutions.

Likewise banning hard to impossible things to detect like AI under the presumption of it being used for “cheating” will lead to situations where you don’t know for certain if AI was used or not. Similarly you may be inadvertently excluding very talented developers who want to participate in their limited spare time and are leveraging AI to complete mundane tasks and stay competitive.

Every hackathon will get low effort submissions, AI or not. You can put in your rules that low effort submissions may not be judged but a better solution is to simply judge them quickly and move on. Often they’ll miss another submission criteria and be disqualified anyways.

Judging Criteria

Fairness is the cornerstone of a successful hackathon. An event perceived as unfair can damage your organization's reputation and erode community trust. To ensure a fair competition, you must have clear judging criteria. This process flows directly from the goals you defined in the planning stage.

For example, if your hackathon's focus is on developing robust backend applications, your criteria might include:

• Technical Implementation: The quality, efficiency, and elegance of the code.
• Scalability: The application's ability to handle growth and increased load.
• API Design: The clarity, usability, and documentation of the endpoints.
• Innovation: The novelty and creativity of the technical solution.

Alternatively, if the goal is to highlight exceptional UI and UX design, your criteria would shift to:

• User Experience (UX): The intuitive design, ease of use, and overall user journey.
• Visual Design (UI): The aesthetic appeal, branding consistency, and visual polish.
• Accessibility: The project's usability for people with diverse abilities.
• Impact: How effectively the design solves the user's problem.

Regardless of the focus, you will want to make sure the judging criteria is public, specific, and ideally, weighted. You’ll also want to be clear on the exact criteria. For example:

• Scalability may include a predefined stress-test (ex. 1,000 requests per minute for 5 minutes). 
• API Design could measure completeness of the documentation, is every endpoint defined with a good description?
• Accessibility might run a website through a predefined battery of existing standardized accessibility criteria.

If your competition needs to include criteria like Innovation or Visual Design which are harder to pin down into explicit rules then consider doing some of the following depending on your hackathon’s needs:

• Have separate prizes recognizing innovation and visual design so that these scores don’t factor into who wins the main prize pool.
• Weight subjective evaluations lower so participants don’t feel their outcome is due to chance / mood of the judges.
• Be very clear when you have a subjective criteria. Be prepared to put participants at ease – I’ll talk about this more in the next post!
• Involve highly qualified judges. If someone at your organization or community is well known for their ability to innovate or design then have them judge this criteria.

Above all you must ensure that your judging criteria places everyone on an equal footing. Participants should not be able to purchase more robust compute, software, or other resources to achieve better results than their competitors.

Have a complete rubric ready to be published the moment you announce the hackathon and especially before hacking starts. Participants are going to have questions no matter how good your criteria are and providing them with detailed, logical, and transparent criteria ahead of time will put you on a great footing.

Judges

Just as important as what is being judged is who is doing the judging. Your panel of judges should be qualified, respected, and recognizable to your community. Excellent candidates include highly visible community members, employees who work directly with your community, the engineers who build the software being used in the hackathon, or relevant, trusted influencers in your industry; even if they’re not directly in your organization or community. The key for any judge is that they have some good reason that they should be a judge.

It can be tempting to delay this decision or simply state that "the organization will be judging." but being opaque can undermine the trust you’re trying to build. Announce your judges publicly and well in advance. This transparency demonstrates your commitment to a fair and credible process.

On the other side of the coin, emotions can sometimes run high in hackathons. Participants can spend weeks building and not receive the results they expected. While you should be transparent about who the judges are, you don’t need to share the scoring of any individual judge. Nor should you allow judges to be contacted directly by participants regarding their submissions.

Prizes

Prizes are powerful motivators that reward engagement and celebrate achievement. A well-structured prize strategy can significantly boost participation and excitement. Most importantly prizes should reach different levels of participants from casual users who may or may not create a final submission up to the most talented and dedicated participants.

Participation Perks

Reward everyone who shows up. A digital badge, a special role in your community Discord, or other small tokens of recognition are excellent for acknowledging participation. These can often be automated or self-assigned. If you use a third-party hackathon platform, ensure these digital rewards are also reflected within your core community space. While these perks may seem minor, they build a sense of shared history and belonging that community members will value and look back on. They serve as markers for a user’s journey and pay dividends well into the future.

Community Kudos

Recognize and reward participants who elevate the experience for everyone. These prizes can take the form of small monetary awards or exclusive badges for those who are exceptionally helpful, provide great feedback to peers, or foster collaboration. Do not underestimate the power of these awards. They generate immense goodwill and contribute directly to your community's flywheel. Many recipients of these prizes will transition from the hackathon into active and helpful long-term members of your community.

Runner-up Rewards

These are runner-up prizes for teams who delivered great projects but did not secure a top spot. These awards can include moderately sized monetary prizes (for example, 10% of the grand prize) but should also feature non-monetary rewards. Offer public recognition on social media, a feature on your company blog, exclusive meetings with your engineering teams, or free platform credits. These incentives encourage talented developers to continue building and engaging with your ecosystem long after the hackathon concludes.

Top Prizes

These are the grand prizes that everyone will of course want to win. They should include the largest monetary awards as well as all the recognition and exposure offered at the "Runner-up" level. The value of these prizes should align with the complexity and expectations of the hackathon. As a general guideline, consider what you might pay a contractor to produce your vision of a good hackathon submission. Your grand prize could be equal to or double that amount, with second place at half the top prize, and third place at a third. This is not a rigid formula, but it provides a solid starting point. Ask yourself: would an expert in your field feel that winning the top prize is a worthy reward for their time and effort?

Promotional Activity

A brilliant hackathon plan deserves an equally brilliant promotional strategy to attract the right talent. To ensure a great turnout, you must actively market your event across multiple channels. This involves a coordinated effort across social media, targeted community outreach, strategic partnerships, and sponsorships. I’ll talk more about this in the next chapter of this series but you’ll want to identify:

• The platforms your community uses the most – both those run by your organization and outside of it.
• Key people who can draw attention to your hackathon such as influencers, domain experts, and trusted leaders.
• Key organizations you can do partnerships, sponsorships, and cross-promotional content with.

Above all your promotional strategy should balance exciting and engaging existing community members to get them involved and outreach to new faces to draw them in and give them a reason to try out both your technology and community.

Thanks for reading and for getting this far here’s another photo of my dog Asher. He's had a bit of stomach upset these past few days which has led to both of us waking up roughly every 2-3 hours at night for a walk. On the plus side he's been to the vet and is starting to feel better.