Promoting your Event

Learn about marketing!

When promoting your hackathon, it’s useful to keep in mind that most events have a 30-50% drop-off in attendance. Given these stats, it’s your goal to over-market and overbook!

Marketing your hackathon is another one of the major areas of focus one has while planning it out. The aim here is to reach as many people as possible with the focus on the right audience meant for the event. But before that, it is necessary to evaluate your target community and region as the focus of marketing. You can have a hackathon in your local community, city and extend it to your state, country and even abroad. Written below are certain strategies that might help you promote your event.

Tell Your Hackathon’s Story

What’s your hackathon’s "brand?" How is it unique? Why would you want to attend?

• The more tailored your message, the better. Make it school-specific.

• Use the same messaging to stay consistent and build momentum

• Highlight hackathon benefits perks and the ease of attending: it’s free of cost, transportation will be provided, etc.

It would be great to include a short case study or example "about us" page from a successful hackathon here to show, rather than just tell, organizers how effective branding works.

Hackathon Marketing Strategies

• Post Flyers!

  • Follow your schools rules but post them everywhere you can. People underestimate how much flyers can help advertise their event.

• Invite students from other schools to attend

  • Look at schools that have previously hosted MLH hackathons

  • Look at other schools in your area/region. We suggest at least 3 schools within 6 hours of your campus

  • Don’t overlook community colleges — they’re often full of eager and promising participants

• Speak in-person during the first 5 minutes of relevant classes and student group meetings on your campus.

  • Explain what it is, why they should care, when and where it’s being held, and how they can get more info.

• Set up a table in the main area of your building for a few hours(with school permission)

  • Show sneak peeks of swag, explain what a hackathon is to those who are not familiar, hand out the website url or a QR code to those who stop by on quarter page flyers or business cards.

• Reach out to student groups and departments on all campuses

  • Groups: ACM & IEEE, SWE, SHPE, etc.

  • Departments: Computer Science, Design, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Physics, Business Studies

    • Professors and Resource Hubs on campus may be willing to share things out to their students. Some may even offer extra credit to their students for attending your event!

  • Think of other clubs or departments that may hold students interested in the other side of hacking (i.e. project management, design, UX, etc) such as entrepreneurship, communication, graphic design, and many more!

• Launch a Social Media campaign

  • Make a TikTok, Facebook Page, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit & LinkedIn account.

    • Consider having targeted Facebook or Instagram Ads. These are cheap and effective!

  • Invite and connect to all your friends and members of on and off-campus hacker groups. Check out the Hackathon Hackers as an example.

  • Ask other hackathons to tweet or post about you.

  • Reach out different community members to partner with your hackathon! The go to examples for these can be your local GitHub Campus Experts, Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors, Google Developer Groups, Facebook Developer Circles, etc.

• Get some pre-event press coverage

  • Tell your school’s paper

  • Reach out to your local media outlets

  • Try reaching out to different startup/ media agencies for potential partnership.