Even for the most well-known organizations and biggest brands, targeting the right people isn’t always easy.
When it comes to hackathons, this is especially true, because the communities you might want to target (students, universities, developers, start-ups) are usually in high demand and difficult to partner with.
That’s why the most powerful trick in a hackathon organizer’s arsenal is to have a solid promotion plan so your event can reach as many of the right people as possible.
After all, an organizer’s biggest nightmare is for the whole thing to be a flop—not getting enough participants, people forgetting to show up, or the conversation to vanish as soon as the event is over.
To avoid this embarrassing and demoralizing scenario, you’ll need to target the right communities and create a fool-proof promotion plan to ensure its success.
Done right, your promotion plan can work for you in the background, drumming up hype and excitement while you get on with the planning.
We’ve put together six fool-proof ways to promote your next hackathon, along with examples and tips to help you master each step.
But first, let’s talk about identifying your audience.
Identify your target audience
The tighter you can lock down your perfect audience, the stronger your promotion plan will be so take some time to understand who you’re trying to target for your hackathon.
While your hackathon’s target audience may be broad (startup founders, creative entrepreneurs, etc.), there are still characteristics they will share, and identifying these will make your promotion plan easier.
Here are a few things you should know about your ideal audience:
- Demographics (as detailed as is relevant for your hackathon, but the basics are age, location, and profession)
- Their motivation (why do they want to participate in your hackathon?)
- Whether they spend their time online (which social media platforms are they using? What do they talk about/share? How active are they?)
Table of contents
- Send a press release to relevant media houses
- Launch a social media campaign
- Promote your mentors and sponsors
- Contact incubators/accelerators, universities, and startups
- Reach out to colleagues and friends with digital platforms
- Use an events management platform to maintain communication with participants
- Measure your efforts
Let's start with the press release:
1. Send a press release to relevant media houses
The first step in promoting your hackathon is to inform the media about it in the form of a press release.
A well-targeted (and of course, well-written) press release can do wonders for your publicity, but here’s the catch.
It’s vital to remember that the journalist reading your press release isn’t doing so to advertise your hackathon for you.
Wait, isn’t that counter-productive?
Don’t we want them to promote our hackathons?
Yes!
But that’s supposed to be a side-effect of the true goal, which is to engage their audience and get them signed up to participate in your hackathon.
The journalist or blogger reading your press release will only share your press release if they think it will be of interest to their audience.
That means you need to pay special attention to the language you use and ensure you’re talking directly to the community you want to engage with.
Here’s where a lot of hackathon organizers fall into a trap.
Rather than demonstrating why the media house’s audience should be interested in the event, they spend too much time trying to sell the hackathon to the journalist or blogger reading the press release.
That’s not your job.
You should adjust accompanying messaging to suit the media house you’re sending your press release to, but remember: the most crucial thing is that you’re not writing the press release to convince the journalist to share it.
You’re simply using the press house as a middle man to reach your target audience (ie, their current audience).
Need some help writing your press release? Here’s a great post by HubSpot that walks through each step—there’s a free template at the end too.
2. Launch a social media campaign
We won’t go into why social media is a must for promoting events and building communities in 2024 (hopefully you already know that), so let’s get straight into what you can do to create a buzz for your hackathon.
Whichever social media platforms you choose, announce your hackathon and call for submission on there, paying special attention to the platforms where your target community hangs out. Here’s what you can do for each platform:
Interact with potential participants on Twitter
Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, it’s perfectly acceptable to post on Twitter several times throughout the day so it’s a great platform for encouraging engagement.
Identify your relevant community and join in on their conversation using the right hashtags.
Then, create your hashtag for your business and the hackathon and use it whenever you post.
Encourage others to retweet/favorite your tweets and ask people to use the hashtag if they mention the hackathon.
Remember, be responsive and interact with other users.
Share information on Facebook
Facebook is a great platform for communicating with participants without spamming them or overloading them with posts.
To use it effectively, create a business page that’s dedicated to the hackathon and use it to share updates.
You can even use your dedicated hackathon page to encourage participants to ask questions, let your mentors introduce themselves and of course, meet with other participants.
Generate engagement on Instagram
Instagram has an extremely active user base which makes it the best platform for generating engagement.
Find the hashtags relevant to your hackathon, as well as some general ones like #hackathon and #openinnovation, and get your employees/team/volunteers/mentors to use them too.
As well as generating engagement and creating a buzz around your event, your personal hashtags can also help you monitor your hackathon’s impact.
Anyone interested in the event can simply search the hashtag and see everything that’s been shared.
You can then use all of that great user-generated content for your own platforms.
Tip: Instagram is all about Stories and Reels. Make the most out of the platform by sharing fun content to your Stories every day to show participants what’s going on behind the scenes. You can also add polls and questions to your Stories which is a fantastic way to boost engagement, meet Instagram’s algorithm and get insights from your participants.
Other tips: Record the whole event using IGTV or Facebook Live (or have someone else do it). After the hackathon has finished, you can share the full stream on your website, social media and anywhere else you want!
3. Promote your mentors and sponsors
One great way to promote your hackathon is to use your mentors and sponsors.
Your mentors should be experts in their fields, which means more often than not, they’ll have a decent following of their own.
You can tap into their communities by sharing details of your mentors on your social channels and asking them to share them on their channels.
Do this by sharing a post a day (preferably during the week leading up to the hackathon), and introduce the mentor with the proper introductions, credentials, bios, fun facts, etc.
Add a photo and the relevant links (to their website or social media handles). You can do the same with your sponsors—just remember to ask permission before you do so.
4. Contact incubators/accelerators, universities, and startups
Considering your target communities are likely to be startup founders and entrepreneurs, contacting them outright can be a surprisingly easy way to promote your event.
If you’re targeting startups, consider getting in touch with incubators, accelerators, and co-working spaces.
You can ask them to let their peers know about your hackathon and encourage signups, meanwhile, they’ll benefit from the exposure your hackathon can give them, especially if you’re seeking talent.
If you’re targeting students, you may be able to contact university staff directly and tell them about your hackathon and why their students might be interested.
It’s worth remembering, however, that regardless of how well your hackathon might be suited to their students, universities are usually inundated with requests and are extremely in demand.
Be prepared for some initial resistance and skepticism and just focus on explaining exactly why their students could benefit from your hackathon.
5. Reach out to colleagues and friends with digital platforms
Do you have any friends, colleagues, or peers in relevant industries who would be happy to give your hackathon a shoutout?
Go ahead and ask them to feature your event and share it with their community if it makes sense to connect the two.
Podcasts, in particular, are a great way to get the word out and expand your audience because you get to tap into an already engaged audience.
It’s a win-win, too.
They give you access to their audience by bringing you onto the podcast, and you, in turn, share it and promote it across your channels.
6. Use an events management platform to maintain communication with participants
If you want to give participants their best chance of winning your hackathon, consider using a dedicated platform to host your event.
Following the above steps will help you create a solid promotion plan, and an events management platform can help you maintain that strategy so that you can focus on the more important aspects of your hackathon.
When organizers host their hackathon on a dedicated platform, they can automate most of the communication with participants, and spend more time on the actual planning.
That means you can engage with participants throughout the entire process, and keep them engaged too.
7. Measure your efforts
You can’t truly know if you’re making an impact if you don’t measure your efforts, and that’s where a dedicated management platform comes in again.
When you host your hackathon using hackathon software, measuring your efforts becomes easy.
You can track your traffic to see where it’s coming from, and then use that data to hone in on what’s working while rethinking what isn’t.
It’s important to remember that it’s easy to get wrapped up in vanity metrics when you see high website traffic—but if they’re not converting into registrations or ideas, it won’t help you much.
Having a clear and mapped-out understanding of where your conversations are coming from can take your hackathon from average to impactful, which is exactly what you can do on Eventornado.
Whether you use Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel, you can leave the heavy lifting to the platform and focus on organizing a great hackathon.
Organising and promoting a memorable virtual hackathon
Organizing a hackathon doesn’t need to be a stressful experience, as long as you have the right tools in place.
With these seven tried and tested tips, you can generate the buzz your hackathon needs, build a highly engaged community, and generate tons of user-generated content to make your event a success.
For more tips on how an event management platform can turn your planning process into a fool-proof strategy for your next virtual hackathon, schedule a free demo here.
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