Best Practices: Incorporating Hackathon Sponsors

Featuring sponsors is a great way to include partners, add to the prize pool, and increase the marketing reach for your hackathon. However, just because you’ve seen a structure on other hackathons doesn’t mean it worked well! Here are a few keys to successful sponsor integration:

Take the rules seriously.

Take the time to fine-tune what you are looking for from participants and what your sponsors are requesting BEFORE rules are finalized and the site is published. The rules are required for competitions to protect you and the participants. They are a contract between you and the public. Who can participate, what they must do to enter, how they will be judged, what the deadlines are, and what is required to win each prize are extremely important. The hackathon experience is better for everyone if the details are finalized in advance, which they must be.

Simplify. 

You are the main sponsor. Set the requirements for participation to revolve around your product and goals and then use sponsor prizes to support this goal.

Simple Example: 

What to Build: a decentralized application using our developer tool. 

What to Submit: a demo video, a code repository, and a text description explaining the project.

To be eligible for sponsor prizes, integrate one or more of the sponsor developer tools into your submission.

Set the stage for your sponsors.

• Limit the number of sponsors to a manageable amount. We all hope you receive a million eligible entries, but there’s always a strong possibility that some sponsors will not receive anything for their track, particularly if there are a lot of sponsors. Set a reachable bar.
• Limit the requirements a sponsor can add to your main challenge. Every additional requirement or step a developer must do to be eligible is a place where you will lose them. Mini-challenges are mostly distractions. See chart above for ideal structure.
• Cap the sponsors to equal prize amounts. If Sponsor 1 offers $500 and Sponsor 2 offers $50,000, you will skew the submission results.

Be clear and honest with your prizes.

We don’t want to rain on your parade. The truth is that competition and tax laws are very real and you can lose all of your goodwill with developers as soon as they start to feel misled. Here are the key points:

• Never remove or lower prizes after the hackathon is live! 
• Never overvalue the retail value of prizes. 
• Never promise prizes that you may not give out. 
• All prizes must be guaranteed to members of the hackathon. (You can’t have a big fund, say anyone can apply, and not have something set aside as guaranteed for hackathon applicants)
• Even if guaranteed, the requirements for how to achieve it need to be stated clearly in the rules for the hackathon and cannot be changed. You cannot change the ‘how to achieve it’ when it comes to judging just because you don’t like the eligible submission.
• Bigger isn’t necessarily better. It’s not a race for the biggest prize amount. Offer reasonably valued prizes with many opportunities to win. 

Grants are not part of the prize pool.

There are a few reasons we don't allow grants as integral parts of hackathons:

• Most grants allow anyone to apply, whether they are in the hackathon or not, so it's not exclusive to the hackathon.
• Most grant programs have different criteria. With hackathons, you'll give prizes no matter what to the best projects that were eligible.
• Similarly, competition rules are a challenge because translating a grant and a hackathon into one set of rules is hard and not worth doing.

That said, there are opportunities to promote the grant as part of the hackathon, whether it's a separate tab on the site or an email update through the system to users. But it shouldn't be part of the rules or prize pool.

Communicate.

The most important thing you can do is communicate with the participants. If your participants are unhappy and are not receiving responses, they will post about it publicly. Developers are generally understanding as long as they are being heard, responded to, and respected. Hackathons are a great way to build an engaging and loyal community. Let’s make the most out of it!