Running Closing Ceremony

Once you’ve selected your winners for the event, it's time to announce them in a closing ceremony! Having a closing ceremony ensures that hackers get enough recognition of their achievements and your other supporters also get a chance to say a final word to your attendees. It also helps everyone to sum up with the same energy they had during the start of the hackathon and reflect on the great experience they had overall! Typically we have seen the following best practices for hosting a closing ceremony:

• When the closing ceremony is coming up make an announcement saying that the closing will be starting soon.

• Talking over slides is the best format for this. In advance, ask your sponsors to give you a list of their prize winners.

• Make sure to inject a lot of energy and excitement into your announcements!

• This is a big moment for your event, and ending strong is super important — people tend to remember the beginning and the end of an event afterwards for years to come.

• Make sure you celebrate all the hackers' achievements, what they were able to build and what that means!

• Having a playback of their submission video can be a great way to showcase projects as well. Keep in mind that if you have any live demos that setup time and running over take more time than you think. Plan for 10 minutes for each team that live demos(with 3 for actual demo time and 1-2 for the crowd to ask questions, and the rest for setup/swapping to the next group). We recommend instead encouraging hackers to see each others projects while final deliberations for judging is going on instead of live demos at closing ceremony.

Check out an example closing ceremony deck after the opening ceremony slide example here