5 good reasons why you need a platform for your online, hybrid, or physical hackathon

Michele Erba

Hackathon Expert

Introduction
Registration automation
Matchmaking and team formation
Collect the hackathon deliverables
Event chat
Review the ideas
Conclusions

1. Introduction

A common mistake when organizing a hackathon is to believe everything can be done with free or internal tools.

Well, yes, you can do that, but it will be much more difficult than relying on a hackathon platform built exactly for the purpose.

Organizing a hackathon is a complex task and requires sophisticated project management skills, such as:

Coordinating hundreds or thousands of registrations
Collecting tens or hundreds of submissions
Communicating with participants
Connect the mentors with the teams
Effectively share information and resources about the hackathon
Retrieving evaluations from the jury members

If you plan to do this with the classic tools, you will have to switch from one software to another constantly, making sure that everything is up to date and matching the latest development of the event.

Imagine you collect registration through Google Forms and send registration confirmation emails through MailerLite.

You have to make sure that the registration data on the former is aligned with the latter.

Is it easy?

Not much.

And if you make mistakes, there's the chance you're not compliant with the Terms and Conditions of your event, where you allegedly provided your hackathon process and you stated that all the registrants would receive communication from the hackathon after successful registration.

This is just one of the many examples of the tricky situation that hackathon organizers could face if they decide not to use a hackathon platform.

In this article, we provide 5 great examples of situations in which a hackathon platform having your back can make your life much easier and result in a flawless event.

Let's begin with the registration process.

2. Registration automation

The Eventornado hackathon platform comes with a powerful registration form, which is fully customizable.

You can ask for simple data like age, gender, and job role but also collect files like CVs.

All the registration data is collected and managed directly on the Registration tab, where you can mark registrants, make notes, and even send emails to all or just to selected individuals:

No need to match data from here to there.

Everything is updated instantly and seamlessly.

3. Matchmaking and team formation

There are 2 main types of matchmaking and team formation processes:

Open matchmaking
Closed matchmaking

Open matchmaking

This is the case where the registrants are allowed to autonomously create a team and invite other team members or join another team.

It can be easily done by leveraging the "Ideas" tab on Eventornado, where all the registrants can click on each idea, understand if it's a good fit, and then apply to join a team:

This team formation process is widespread in external hackathons rather than internal ones.

Closed matchmaking

This is the case where the registrants cannot choose a team on their own but are assigned by the organizers instead.

Internal hackathons are a great example of this since they often adopt the manual matchmaking process.

On Eventornado you can manually create and manage all the teams through the “Teams” tabs on the Admin dashboard:

Imagine that you need to have a defined mix of skills and profiles in the teams, such as:

UX/UI Designer
Coder
Graphic designer
Video maker

Or, for a corporate hackathon, the perfect team composition must be for example:

Project Manager
Sales Rep
IT
Procurement
Legal
Business Administration
External participant

All this can be easily ensured by using the “Teams” tab on Eventornado.

4. Collect the hackathon deliverables

For this, you need to have an “Idea” form, where you provide the fields where the teams can submit their deliverables.

All these fields can be linked to a specific hackathon timeline and will appear only during a determined period of time:

This way, the fields will not appear during the creation of the idea, when no work has been done yet.

They will appear during the hackathon / before the hackathon's final deadline.

That makes sense, right?

You, as an admin, will be able to see and manage all the ideas and deliverables directly from the “Ideas” tab on your Admin dashboard:

This is your place to keep track of the teams' progress in real-time and preview all the already submitted deliverables.

Imagine collecting all these files, links, and solutions through a Form or a Drive: it would be really hard to manage.

5. Event chat

Once an Event is created on Eventornado you'll have the chance to communicate directly on a dedicated Discord chat which will be private and accessible only to the registered participants, mentors, organizers, and invited stakeholders:

Once a team is created on Eventornado a private team chat is automatically generated on Discord.

What are the benefits of this?

Well, everything is connected and automated.

For example, if the team decides to change the team name, the Discord team chat name will change accordingly.

Furthermore, if the team composition changes and a member is removed/added on Eventornado then she/he will be automatically also removed/added to the Discord private team chat.

Imagine keeping track of everything on a third communication tool: the team name is changed on the Form and it must be reflected also on the communication tool of your choice.

It's better to have everything connected and integrated like on Eventornado.

At last, you can always check the Event chat on the go by using the Mobile App on your device:

6. Review the ideas

Another benefit of relying on a hackathon platform for your event is that you can easily collect all the ideas and send them out for evaluation to the Jury Members.

They will receive an email with the link to review, and once they click they will be presented with all the ideas to be evaluated.

Jury Members are usually busy people so we made the process as simple as possible.

They don't have to create a profile, they don't have to log in.

They just click on ideas, explore the deliverables, and evaluate the criteria you've set up for them.

Pretty easy, right?

7. Conclusions

The 5 reasons mentioned above are just some main examples of why relying on a hackathon platform is the correct idea if you're planning to host a hackathon.

In general, a hackathon platform…