When it comes to sharing your hackathon with your team or organization, don’t be shy! Make sure you are taking advantage of all available resources. Here are some tips we’ve collected that might help you out:
Plan it out.
Formulate a communications strategy leading up to your hackathon. It is absolutely essential that you share news about the competition and drive registrations on your hackathon. Your team or organization is busy and it’s easy to lose track of time. Here are some key things to keep in mind with your plan:
- Draft shareable copy for team leads and managers. Make it easy for them to share your hackathon highlights with a quick one-sentence description and details. We put together some sample messaging for you.
- Save the date. Include Add-To-Calendar links in your messaging and/or mark it down on a company-wide calendar.
- Schedule continued outreach. Depending on the format and length of your hackathon, you should schedule communications throughout the submission period. Include deadline reminders, upcoming workshops, and motivational content from leadership.
- We recommend focusing your efforts to get registrations early on and then focusing on converting your registrants once the event is underway.
Pick your channels.
Be sure to reach your audience where they are most active. Below are some high-level examples, but ask around your organization to find any other potential channels for promotion:
- Team Chat. Post in your Microsoft Teams, Slack, or other communication platform. Pro tip: make a dedicated hackathon space within your chat service to prevent your content from getting lost. Ours is called #hack-friday.
- Email. Send out a company-wide email with the key information and a prominent call to action to register.
- Meetings. If your departments have stand-up meetings, ask the team leads to add it to the next agenda.
- Devpost Announcement. Schedule announcements to go out to your registrants to keep them informed and excited. Here is a helpful article on posting announcements.
Track results.
Keep an eye on your hackathon metrics to see if and when participants are registering. You can even add a custom registration question to ask where they heard about it. This will help you to nudge the right people and to focus on the best performing communication methods for the next hackathon.
Need more help? We’re always here for you! help@devpost.team