I recently hosted the Code for Impact hackathon, so with that fresh in my mind I thought it would be helpful to write this guide to hosting an online hackathon based on what I’ve learned. This will go into everything you should do, in order, to be able to host a successful online hackathon, from my anecdotal experience and the recommendations of Hack Club and Major League hacking, 2 organisations that support hackathons for young people.
First - three questions to ask yourself
These 3 questions are really central to creating a successful hackathon - you should be able to answer these before you start organising anything.
- Who do I want attending my hackathon? This is mainly about ages, interests and entrants’ technical ability.
- Why are you organizing this hackathon? It’s a lot better to have authentic motivation than just wanting a cool project to boast about.
- When will my hackathon take place & how long will it last? If you’re hosting a student hackathon 🏖️ holidays are best, and, even if not, it’s good to give people a realistic amount of time to produce the quality of project that you’d like to see.
These 3 questions should be able to guide you towards a theme, but if you’re stuck on this, I’d recommend:
- keeping it broad - focusing on a narrow area will limit your appeal
- looking into areas that interest you and people around you - this will make it easier for you to understand how much can be realistically made related to your theme over your time-frame
- ask potential attendees and look into past hackathons - what topics are popular?
This way, you’ll find a theme that you’re interested in - which is great for supporting entrants - and one that will attract entrants as well.
Hosting an in-person hackathon?
Hack Club’s guide goes in-depth on sponsors for in-person hackathons, so that’s better to follow if you’re planning on an in-person event.
Next - laying the groundwork for your hackathon
You can’t do this all by yourself, so this stage will focus on forming a team, and getting together the resources that you’ll need to host your hackathon.
Branding
Try to come up with an original name for the hackathon - that makes the theme of your hackathon clear and sounds engaging. Try to keep it short and snappy. You could also make a logo for your hackathon, using a tool like Canva, but using a font you like and possibly an icon is enough - don’t over-complicate this unless you have a graphic designer on your team.
Speaking of team-mates: finding a team
A team will help you to share workload and responsibilities. I didn’t work in a team, so this advice is from Sam’s awesome Hack Club hackathon guide:
Form a team of up-to five fellow organizers. Approach friends and acquaintances who’d share your excitement and passion for your event. Set yourself up with a group chat and a shared to-do list. Avoid creating too big of a team, the law of diminishing returns comes into play here, meaning you’ll spend as long managing your team as actually working on hackathon tasks. For an online event, you could also try the Hack Club Slack and other similar online communities for finding teammates.
A place on the web
It’s an online hackathon, so you’ll need a website to promote and share it, which you can make in a few ways.
- Custom website - you can make a website from scratch, ideally in HTML or with a JS framework, with information on your hackathon and host it online. You’ll be able to have total control over your hackathon’s branding and visual style, and also have a professional email to reach out to sponsors with (this will become important soon). This is the option I went for, and would recommend, as long as you have the technical ability to build a website from scratch or follow a tutorial like this one.
- DevPost Page - you’ll most likely one for a hackathon anyway, so you could create a customised DevPost page to serve as your hackathon’s info page. This is a quick way to get your hackathon online, and even though I don’t love DevPost’s UX, it’s definitely really easy to use.
Getting a domain name for your hackathon
You’ll need a domain name to host your hackathon’s website - these cost about $10 but you can get one for free through Hack Club’s HCB fiscal sponsorship program. This isn’t accessible in some countries (like India), so if this isn’t suitable, you can use a {event-name}.codeforimpact.dev domain for free, as well as an {event-name}@codeforimpact.dev email from me - reach out at [email protected] to get a quick response from me.
On cheap TLDs
Some top-level-domains (TLDs) like .top, .vip and .club are very affordable, but these are commonly used for spam, so your emails will likely get blocked if you use one of these. Try to stick to the standard fare of .com, .net, .org, .dev etc (also I can see the irony in this, don’t worry).
A community for hackathon attendees
A Discord server is a great way to chat, host online events and more, so you should create one for your hackathon. This template by Github’s Education Program will be perfect - it’s also a good idea to familiarise yourself with how Discord works using that guide, in case you don’t have experience with Discord.
Other little parts
You should make a DevPost page for your hackathon - this is an easy way to list and promote your hackathon, even if you’re making your own website, this will come in handy by allowing attendees to register and get updates from you. Some other guides recommend making a Google Form for registrations - don’t, bulk emailing is a pain so it’s better to communicate through Discord and DevPost, in my experience.
What next? The chicken and egg problem (finding sponsors and entrants)
Once you’ve found a topic for your hackathon, and have the resources ready to start promotion, there are 2 things you’ll need - and unfortunately both of these need the other to have already happened. You need sponsored prizes to attract entrants, but you need signed-up entrants to attract sponsors, so this seemingly creates a ‘chicken and egg problem’.
However, the best way around this is to create a plan to promote the hackathon, optimistically predict how many people will attend the hackathon as long as this plan works, and reach out to sponsors quoting these figures. 50 registrations is a good target - it’s attainable with the promotion methods I’ll explain, and it will be enough to get sponsors interested.
Finding, and reaching out to sponsors
Many tech companies are willing to sponsor hackathons (especially those targeting young people), so it’s best to focus on this sector. You should create a list of potential sponsors, focusing on those whose products are related to your hackathon’s theme. If you have connections to anyone who works in a company who you think might sponsor your hackathon, it’s definitely worth reaching out.
Finding potential sponsors
The same companies sponsor lots of hackathons - you should look at the sponsors for events similar to yours on DevPost; these companies will be much more likely to sponsor your event than others.
To reach out, write a professional email detailing:
- core details about your event and you - going back to the 3 Ws - what inspired you to host this hackathon
- how the company can help
- what you’d like from them - you can ask for cash if you have a HCB account to receive it but understand that ‘in-kind sponsorships’ - meaning free access to products the company sells, are a more realistic ask
and send it to their customer support email, or a hackathon support/collaboration request form if they have one. You should ideally send it from a professional-looking email - [email protected] doesn’t exactly scream great organisational and technical skills, now does it.
Consider what they will get out of this collaboration - they aren’t charities so want something of value in return for their support to you. Offering the chance to deliver talks at your event will help with this, as will promising to share a progress report of hackathon entries made with their platform.
Some hackathon organisers also include a prospectus - this is a document explaining what your event is and why you need their support. I don’t think that this is necessary as long as your email is detailed and convincing, but you can have a look at the Code for Impact Prospectus if you’d like to see an example of one.
Promoting your hackathon to entrants
Every hackathon needs attendees - who else will build the awesome projects? Promoting your hackathon involves many methods - there’s no one silver bullet, but it involves trial and error as well as creating original ideas. Some great methods are:
- getting your hackathon listed on the Hack Club hackathons directory - ask in the Hack Club Slack about this
- promote the hackathon on relevant subreddits and Discord communities - start with ones you use and move onto communities relevant to your theme
- promote the hackathon in-person by putting up posters around your local area.
Try anything else you can think of - the more is definitely the merrier when it comes to promotion!
Final tasks
By this point, you should have collected most of the resources you need to host your hackathon, including some prizes and have at least a few registered entrants. Now, you’ll need to work on the fun parts like your schedule, judging and logistical details. Yay! Seriously though, these parts are really important, and you’ll be able to make the hackathon experience much better with these.
Schedule
If you’ve organised any events with sponsors, or other speakers, you should try and confirm a time for this with them. You should also aim to select a start time and end time - it’s nice to host ceremonies at these times, but a pre-recorded video or even nice text message works if you’d rather not host live events (it’s never as bad as you think it is, trust me). You can put this all together into a list of events - you should share this with entrants, while explaining that the events are optional, in case they don’t work because of timezones.
Get Zoom Pro to host live events
Hack Club (oh look it’s them again) offer free Zoom Pro to any teens. You can run /z in the Hack Club Slack to get an invite link, and once you’ve joined this and made yourself host, you can share the link to invite participants to the meeting and get started!
Judging
To form a judging team, you can reach out to judges from previous hackathons, but a great way to find judges is by reaching out to people who have organised hackathons before (don’t be scared, we don’t bite). We’ll be able to recommend judges that we’ve worked with before, helping you to form an expert team. You can also reach out to experts in your field or ask on forums if you’re working on a specific topic, but this may not always be as reliable and successful.
It’s a good idea to create a judging criteria - which means that judging will be standardised between judges. Try to be specific about each level of quality; you should explain the difference between a 3/5 and 4/5 on a criteria, for example. This will reduce subjectivity and transparency will help you by making decisions less biased. I used DevPost’s built-in judging system, which is uncomplicated but leads to less nuanced results and less valuable feedback.
Other stuff
There are lots of little miscellaneous tasks that need doing in the process of organising a hackathon, so I tried to list as many as I could here:
- Entrants and judges often expect participation certificates, so you can make these in bulk with Certifier and even use Zapier, an integration tool, to combine it with an OpnForm form. This means that certificates can be issued automatically, which is great.
- Make sure your hackathon has a code of conduct - you should be ready to deal with any unlikely bad behavior, and make sure your entrants know where to go if anything bad happens. You should ideally let entrants know of the risks of participating in a hackathon, and ensure you have parental permission for under-13s.
- Make guides like a FAQ list and a list of major tasks that hackathon attendees need need to do - otherwise you’ll be answering tons of questions from attendees.
- Consider hosting fun events to break up the coding - Jackbox Party Pack Games are great for this, and I found that you can get a subscription for $5 per month with Amazon Luna, which makes it pretty affordable if you don’t own these games. 🎉
On the day
You should have a schedule and everything planned out, so just go for it! Be confident, and ready to spend a while answering questions and hosting events. Be sure you keep everyone updated on what they need to do during the event.
Infrequently Asked Questions
But I need a budget, right?
Not necessarily. Finding funding for first-time online hackathons is pretty difficult, but you can avoid spending any money, with the dissapointing caveat that you likely won’t be able to offer the most exciting prizes. The only cost I had to pay for the Code for Impact hackathon I hosted was the Jackbox Subscription I mentioned (probably one of the best $5 I’ve ever spent).
What if something technical goes wrong during the event?
The chances are very low, but practising how to use Zoom, Discord etc will help to mitigate this. If the worst happens, explain the situation to your participants and they’ll be understanding - just be sure to be transparent, explain the situation and try not to worry about this.
I have a different question, help!
No problem, reach out to me at [email protected] and I’ll be able to answer it or, at least, point you in the right direction!
Thanks for reading this, and I really hope this was useful to you!
Also, a big thank you to:
- Sam (@sampoder), who wrote Hack Club’s hackathon guide (did I mention that this is awesome)!
- The sponsors and organisations who helped with the Code for Impact hackathon, which helped me to learn everything that became this guide.