5 Tips To Keep Your Hackathon Participants Engaged

Marie Rosalie Hanni

Marketing lead at Eventornado

You've done your pre-work and got a lot of participants. Now what? What is the key to a successful hackathon? Short answer - the people! How well your hackathon participants are engaged and collaborate is a crucial part of any hackathon's success.

How to engage your hackathon participants?

Keeping your hackathon participants engaged is much like community engagement. It's about creating the right atmosphere and environment to make people comfortable starting conversations. It's about taking a strategic approach to the relationships, communication, and interactions between everyone involved in the hackathon. Contrary to what you might think, the journey to engage hackathon participants doesn't start when the event starts. First, you have to make sure they attend at all. The pre-event communication is just as important. 

5 Tips To Keep Your Hackathon Participants Engaged

Time to get your tips!

Index

1. Onboard the participants
2. Establish your communication channels
3. Organize face-to-face time before the hack starts
4. Form teams early
5. Use gamification

1. Onboard the participants

If someone registers to your hackathon then don't just leave them waiting for the event to start (they just might forget about you). This is one of the biggest reasons for participant dropouts. Right after they register, send them a welcome email with important details about your hackathon. Do include: 

• list of all platforms/tools you'll be using for your event,
• the timeline of the event,
• introduce your mentors,
• introduce the cause and the WHY behind your hackathon
• inform them about the hackathon process and the next steps
• write a compelling welcome message in your Event Chat

Yes, the prize money might be great (and they'll be using it to develop their solution further…) but people might be much more motivated if they feel that there is a bigger cause they are contributing to.

For example: changing lives, saving the climate, changing the course of a field, innovating a sector, and taking it to the next level.

Whatever it is, make sure you are communicating this.

This will bring people together to work on the same goal - this is grounds for the best community engagement ever!

2. Establish your communication channels

A good way to start engaging your participants from the get-go is to use a dedicated event chat and keep all your communication there.

Pick a communication platform and make sure everyone joins.

Best if the users can also download a mobile app, so you can keep them updated on the go.

Make sure to create different channels in the chat to keep communication clear and easy to follow,  for example:

• Announcements
• Introductions
• Matchmaking
• Ask-mentors
• Ask-organizers
• Challenge support and more. 

Start posting in the chat regularly to get the first communication going.

For example, share extra information about the challenges, mentors, and prizes and have a call to action for new participants to introduce themselves. 

In Eventornado, the event chat is built into the platform.

All the registered participants are added to the event chat and the relevant channels automatically.

You can also manage the participants, for example reaching out directly to idea owners or archiving the passive ones. 

3.  Organise an ideation phase with several live sessions before the hack starts

Hackathons are a lot about bringing people together and often it needs a little bit of facilitation to get people connecting. So it is a good idea to design rituals around the hackathon for that.

For example, if your hackathon has a specific theme or topic, you could consider organizing an ideation phase with several live sessions.

This could be experts sharing their know-how about the topic and leading discussion groups around the challenges in the field.

It could also be a workshop to introduce specific resources or technology.

Additionally, you could arrange 1-1 introductions between people - for example, “speed-dating” between participants for better matchmaking.

Having an opening ceremony where everyone can gather before the hackathon starts and teams start building is always a good idea.

We suggest picking a great moderator, who will motivate the participants and set the atmosphere of the event, you can also give important information and answer questions that the participants might have. 

PS. In Eventornado, you can add all the important dates to the timeline so all participants know exactly when and where they can join in for the next face-to-face session.

All the times are shown in the viewers' timezone to avoid any confusion. 

4. Form teams early

The earlier the team building starts, the better.

No one wants to build teams during the hackathon, that's the time to get your hands dirty building your solution.

The easiest way is to use a dedicated hackathon platform so the idea owner can post their idea and start attracting team members. Alternatively, you can ask the idea owners to introduce their ideas in the communication channels to speed up the team assembling. 

PS. Doesn't matter if your event is online or offline - team formation in Eventornado is made simple.

Idea owners post their ideas and can set the missing skills in their team.

Then people can apply to join with one simple click.

After they are accepted, they are added to the team’s private chat automatically.  

5. Use gamification

As said already, hackathons are a lot about bringing people together.

And what better way to do that than adding some fun to the mix?

You can organize virtual check-ins, minigames, or activities in your communication channels to generate some buzz.

For example:

• Organize a photo contest - invite teams to post funny photos. You can offer a topic for the contest, for example: “How sleeping is for the weak.”
• Post a question in the Random channel and encourage people to answer. It could be something as simple as “What is the most useless fact you know?"
• Post a daily poll in the event chat. It can be about anything from how many cups of coffee someone drank to their favourite coding language.  
• Host a trivia tournament and let teams take part to create a fun competition.
• Create a Spotify playlist and ask the people to add songs with a hackathon theme-related keyword in the title. The participant who adds more relevant songs is the winner!

PS. Eventornado's built-in chat service has an app marketplace with a range of free and open-source apps that can help you create engaging experiences in the event chat.

Launch your first hackathon with Eventornado

Organizing a hackathon can be incredibly rewarding, whether you’re a new startup on the scene or if you’ve already made a name for yourself in the industry and want to make an even bigger impact. 

If you’re ready to launch yours, book yourself in for a free demo of Eventornado to see how easy the planning process can be!

We help all our hackathon organizers to plan, manage and host their events as smoothly as possible, without repetitive tasks and messy workflows. 

Want to read more articles? Check out our library of blog posts and guides where you’ll find lots of useful insights and tips for first-time hackathon organizers.