Take a look and learn some of the practices used by hackathon organizers all around the world. This guide should contain most, if not all, of the practices you need to throw a great hackathon.

Introduction to Organizer Guide

"I learned more in one weekend than I did in the last month of lectures!"

Are you ready to host your school’s very own hackathon?

Code of Conduct

License

Hackathons are an incredible way to bring your community together to learn new skills, build amazing projects, and share ideas. A hackathon is best described as an “invention marathon”. Anyone who has an interest in technology attends a hackathon to learn, build & share their creations over the course of a weekend in a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere. You don’t have to be a programmer and you certainly don’t have to be majoring in Computer Science!

An In-Person event requires everyone be at the location of the event for judging. It may have "digital" aspects (streaming workshops due to limitations of the workshop room size, having a communication platform like Discord for announcements, etc) but the majority of the event will take place in person. Hackers are free to come and go (common if they live nearby), but every hacker shows up in person for check-in and judging. There is no shipping of swag/prizes after the event because they are given out that weekend. Food/Snacks and a venue exist for an in-person event.

A Digital event can be global. While it may be marketed towards certain schools near the host, anyone with an internet connection can participate within the timeframe of the event. These often have videos used for judging, or have a room setup for each team in Discord for live judging, but there is no in-person aspect for food/judging. If shipping/prizes are limited to a certain country the FAQ on the hackathon website and rules on Devpost should clearly state limitations.

We will be prioritizing partnering with In-Person Events this season to make sure we have the greatest impact possible with the resources we have available. Digital events are still a great resource, and we have included information in this guide to help you as you plan, but we will not be able to partner with you for the 2024 Hackathon Season.

We will not be working with hybrid events, and want to warn that we have seen historically that hybrid events are worse for both organizers and hackers. Organizers struggle to coordinate two events simultaneously (a well run digital hackathon is more than just a Discord!). Running an in person event while juggling a Discord can stretch your team very thin. Digital hackers end up feeling left out at hybrid events, and have a less impactful experience.

Some examples that make hackers feel left out with Hybrid events:

• An in person workshop runs late and virtual participants are not notified of the schedule change to accommodate. Or certain workshops are in-person only due to AV issues. Or the AV is hard to hear, at a bad angle, or does not interact with the virtual attendees.

• Delay in communication to virtual attendees on check-in process because the team is busy checking in people in-person

• Less digital engagement than in-person due to limited time in the schedule. We often see more in-person side activities than digital.

• Virtual participants get less interactions with sponsors who are prioritizing their in person table.

• Judging being felt as inconsistent/biased because virtual participants can not answer questions like the teams in person doing a science fair style presentation.

• Judging is run as fully digital despite the majority being in person. Most hackers prefer in person judging over making a video, but some events judge only by video.

• Swag only being for in person attendees- Sponsor and event swag.

• Some virtual attendees gave feedback that they would have liked to have Uber Eats code or similar for food. While this would not be feasible for most event budgets, it is another aspect that feels unfair for the different attendees.

• More giveaways in person than digital

• Collaborating across digital vs in person can be difficult.

• Prizes/swag being shipped and also given out in person can be harder to track and fulfill

These do not encompass all of the issues we have seen, but are just a few of the more common items that make a hybrid event less impactful.

We want your event to focus on being the best event possible for your attendees. This might mean having a smaller in person event you can fully support, but you can use that to grow each year to a larger event size. There are alternative events available for those who can only participate virtually, we encourage you to focus on making the biggest impact you can for the hackers you have at your event.

At Major League Hacking, our goal is to give you the tools to throw the best hackathon humanly possible, which is why MLH Member events get various benefits like:

• Mentorship and Support

• Templates and Tutorials

• Preferred Vendors and Discounts

• Onsite Hackathon Support

• Mini-Events

• Judging Support

• Prizes

• Software Lab

Throughout your planning process, you will be supported by a Hackathon Community Manager (HCM) from MLH to help answer any questions, talk through challenges, and brainstorm new ideas.

During your event, an MLHer (called a Coach) will be on-site to help you and your team with whatever you need. MLHers are event organizers themselves and receive extensive training to become an asset to your team.

Resources

You will need:

• A Windows machine (Check the store page for marbles for minimum specs)

• Streamyard

• A microphone and commanding voice

What is this?

Marbles on Steam is a free game where viewers of a twitch stream can hop in and put their name on a marble. The marbles race through a track with no input from the players. It’s very silly and not skill-based at all.

• Install Steam, if you don’t have a Steam account.

• Download Marbles on Stream.

• Log in to your Twitch account on Marbles.

• Click on the Race button to start a race. Once there, simply select “Random” to have it pick a random track.

• Boot up Streamlyard and stream the game through it

• Once the map loads, tell the folks in the chat to type “!join” to join the race as a marble. No other commands work, and they don’t have any input on the game.

• Important: Stream delay is pretty large. Expect at worst 100 seconds between what you say and it appearing on stream.

• Begin the race once a significant portion of your viewers have joined. Control the camera using the WASD keys, and use Left Alt to display all the names of your marbles. Follow them around the track and provide fun commentary!

• Run the game 3 or so times, and whenever you decide to wrap up, hype up your final race by saying it’s the grand finals for marbles at your hackathon. If you can, award them a fun title for their victory in the Discord Channel!

We have consolidated some Digital Event Specifics here.

First, let us go over some differences between a Digital and In-Person Event.

Digital Sponsorship

Getting sponsorships for Digital Hackathons is much different from an In Person one. This is because sponsors have different goals from different kind of events. Also, a digital hackathon can be organized for a fraction of the cost of an In Person hackathon.

Digital events have significantly lower costs compared to in-person events. This is because the costs of food, lodging & venue which take up a significant chunk are removed. Though the addition of shipping might add to the costs, this too can be greatly reduced with judiciously planning the distribution.

With the right communication and target, you can expect a lot of positive response from the sponsors' side even for a digital hackathon. However, be diligent to communicate with your sponsors at every step of the process. Explain to them the reasons for making your event digital, outline how you will support them throughout the event, and let them know about the success at other digital events.

• As we have noticed with time, sponsors can get much of the same value from a Digital Event as they can an In Person one.

• Prize categories and Workshops can both be run much the same, though sponsors should practice running their workshop through streaming or pre-recorded video.

• Give sponsors their own channel on the chat platform (Slack/Discord) to talk to hackers, and have them introduce themselves so everyone knows who they are how they can be a resource for them. As long as they’re online answering questions from hackers about their company/prize category/workshop/anything else they’re doing that weekend, they’ll have a lot of great interactions with hackers.

  • For digital events set up Google Hangouts or Zoom breakout rooms for your hackers to meet companies one on one, similarly to how they would at a sponsor fair.

• We also strongly recommend doing Office Hours with sponsors.

Communicating with Hackers

• • You can edit videos together on YouTube or iMovie (Mac) or just play them sequentially on the stream. If you pre-record your video, we’ve found music and video can make it much more engaging. Make sure to use royalty-free music!

• Video Calling Platform- for hosting your workshops, mini-events, live demo judging, webinars etc. Recommended Platform: Zoom

  • If possible, encourage folks to turn on their webcams so that everyone can see each other. There may be some attendees who don’t have the bandwidth to connect with video. That’s okay! You may even have some attendees who join without access to a computer. If so, consider asking someone to cast their desktop so folks can follow along or cast your own.

  • Make sure you choose a platform that will allow for the correct number of attendees.

    Some popular options are:
• Virtual Conference Platform- can be used for running the whole event in a consolidated space. These platforms are a bit costly but the hacker experience they provide is much better than using different streaming and calling platforms. Recommended Platforms: Hopin, Gather.Town

Budgeting for Digital Events

• Distributing swag in a digital world might look a bit difficult as the costs of shipping are associated with them. We would recommend you to look at the different options available which can be easily fulfilled from your side within a budget. We recommend using the local postal services (like USPS or Indian Post) as they often are the most reliable & economical shipping providers.

  • Utilizing too much money into the shipping and fulfilment of swag and prizes in a digital event is not valuable as it might be for an in-person event. Use your best judgement when it comes to how much to spend on swag for a digital event

  • If you don’t have the budget to ship everyone something for a digital event, you can send a package to each university club that participated and have them handle the distribution. That should keep shipping (and labor) low, while letting you allocate your budget toward something high-impact.

  • Keep in mind however you’re shipping, this doesn’t need to happen directly after your online event. We encourage you to take a few days off to rest and recover before you start the shipping process. Alternatively, you can send out swag to arrive before the event starts so hackers can post on social media and generate hype.

• For Digital Events we recommend checking for prizes that can be easily fulfilled with free delivery through Amazon or any other online service.

Digital Attendance and Engagement

Since hackers do not need to make travel arrangements to attend a digital hackathon, you will likely see sign-ups rising closer to the event start that you may see at in-person events. The exciting part of this is you now have the ability to promote your event to hackers anywhere in the world!

Digital Check-ins

It is still important for Digital Events to have a check-in process. Examples include Discord bots, Google forms, and Typeform. If you have a separate registration platform, building in a small check in button that reveals all the day of information and links is a great way to get this done.

Digital Engagement

In a physical event, you can quickly communicate with people in the same room as you. However, at a digital event, you’ll need to set up an environment so that people feel comfortable starting conversations as they would in-person.

Having a chat channel like Slack/Discord is essential. Creating separate channels for groups, teams, and interests would be the first step. We also suggest your organizing team to be active on these platforms to help facilitate conversations, moderate threads and get people chatting. This also makes your hackathon more accessible for people who have a hard time in large groups.

Digital Judging

You can follow our Judging process later in the guide, but some important differences for digital events have to do with how hackers how off their projects, and how Devpost classifies Digital Events.

Live Judging: If you are doing a digital event, we recommend making a discord voice channel for each team (Team 1, Team 2...., Team 50). Hackers can wait in the call then screenshare/join video as judges join the channel.

Devpost: Since hosting Digital Hackathons is a paid service on Devpost, you need to contact their support for conversion of your in person hackathon into a digital one from their side. Devpost people are kind enough to provide their platform for free for any community/ student hackathons that might be happening around!

Digital Day-Of

Last but not least, here is a quick reference check-list for items you want ot ensure happen day-of:

• Check-in is ready and up (You have all the information you might need later on)

• Streaming platform is ready to go

• Opening ceremony ready to go

• Sponsors are on your chat platform with their assigned roles

• The schedule is accurate and visible to attendees

• Hackers have access to relevant channels on the chat platform

• Mentors and judges are confirmed

• Internal tasks are assigned to individual members of the organizing team

Hacker Hangouts are a great way to meet other people and mingle. It’s hard to bump into someone and spark a conversation digitally, so we created this event to foster those moments of social interaction!

You will need:

• Access to Zoom and breakout rooms

• Appointed captains for the breakouts

• A list of questions

You will break hackers up into groups of three. As soon as you get three hackers, have someone volunteer to be a captain, or pick someone, and then break them off. Keep repeating until you are out of friendos.

Three is the sweet spot because it’s small enough to make sure everyone participates, but not as intimidating as one on one. Also, your questions will say five or ten minutes, but those are mostly suggestions.

Share these rules with hackers:

1. Avoid talking about Coronavirus or related topics. Not only is much of our day to day involving it, it’s important to have a space that doesn’t include it in any way, shape, or form.

2. Each group will be assigned a captain. The leader’s main responsibility is to make sure everybody in the group participates.

3. Once the new topic is given, you must move on. If you find yourself not wanting to move on, that’s great but you still gotta go to the next talking point. Talk to them about it afterwards!

4. Be respectful of others. Give them time to talk and share their opinions, thoughts, etc. It’s essential to give everyone a safe space so that everyone feels encouraged to participate.

Pro tips for making questions if you need to:

• Start off light, and end on a positive note. The middle question can be deeper and more introspective, but we want open participation, so avoid sensitive topics.

• Also, avoid questions with discrete answers. Instead of asking, “what’s your favorite movie,” try to ask people to tell you stories about times they went to a movie theatre

  • You can always do an, “and why?” if you want to run a “favorite” question.

• Try to be on brand with the event you’re at! For example, Hack Girl Summer’s questions should have a different overall theme than Hack the Chain’s

Some questions to get you headstarted:

• What are the books/movies/games/videos that never get old and always make your day a little brighter?

• What platitude do you think is bullshit? What platitude do you think holds truth? (Think, "love conquers all," or "when life gives you lemons...")

• Assume you have a lot of musical talent. If you started a band, how many people would be in it and which position would you be? What would you name it? What genre would you play?

• If there was a biopic about you, who would star in the movie of your life?

• What’s one common misconception about you? What’s one assumption about you that’s typically right?

• What was the best year of your life?

• What was your favourite thing or memory about the place you grew up?

• What have you been meaning to do but haven't yet done? Why haven't you done it?

• What is something you’ve done/felt/seen/experienced that you wish you could do again for the first time?

• What is a perfect day for you?

• Tell us about a good friend, and either a memory you have with that person or something you admire about them.

• In the movie *Inside Out*, each person has a set of "core memories" that define who they are and how they behave. What's one of yours?

Streamyard is the service MLH uses to stream to Twitch, Facebook, and Youtube simultaneously. You can control graphics, layouts, and invite hackers to stream with you. All from the browser.

Creating A Broadcast

• Hit the Create a Broadcast button

• Select which platforms you’d like to stream to (typically all of them)

• Give your broadcast a title that will stand the test of time

  • “Marbles” is not a good stream title

  • “Hack at Home Marble Races” is a better stream title

• Include a few sentences of description and whatever logistical information you need to in the description

• Only use schedule for later if you want hackers to see that we’ll be live at a specific time

Pro Tips

• Use a wired internet connection when possible

• Make sure you’re in a quiet environment

• Get familiar with Streamyard before going live the first time

Finding the purpose

As you begin to plan your hackathon, it's important to think about the purpose of your event. Brainstorm with your organizing team the why behind your event. This will help as you make decisions while planning your hackathon.

Finding a purpose is usually very personal to the people who are looking to organize a hackathon. It can be to empower your local community, targeting a specific section of the community, empowering a certain social group, making people aware about a different technology or the computer science in general or even just building out the culture of hackathons in your school or organization. When you have the clarity behind what you actually need to do, you will be easily making decisions on how you need to implement it.

You also need to determine the length of your event. Will people need time to travel to the event? Does your school have classes on Friday? We recommend events start on Friday evening, or Saturday morning, and that the events end on Sunday afternoon. Ending the event on Sunday and announcing winners gives a sense of closure for attendees, and recognizes the work they did over the weekend.

To be a MLH Member Event, your event must be on a weekend (Earliest start Friday, latest end Sunday)

Finding the Date

After you've solidified the purpose of your event, it's time to pick out a date! Things to consider as you choose your date are:

• Major events at your university/ organization: It is important to reduce any chances of a clash or having major events simultaneously around your local community. This will actually determine the interest people might have to attend your event.

• Major holidays and festivals: It depends a lot culturally but having events in and around holidays is a great way to attract more crowd. **

• University breaks: Having events during long breaks might result in reduced participation. This **is because a lot of students tend to take up internships/ summer programs or something similar during these breaks. Having a weekend hackathon during a short break might result in increase participation as well!

• Dates of other hackathons that serve your community: Hackers tend to be more inclined towards having the best experience possible. Having them to decide between two or more hackathons happening around might result in reduced participation and even affecting majorly on the registration to turn up ratio for the event.

• Dates of major exams at your university: Hackers are students too! Scheduling your hackathon after the exams is one of the best things to attract more hackers and have most of their attention. Please keep in mind to have time as organizers to prepare for exams as that will severely affect your ability to give your best to the hackathon experience.

• Date of Hackcon: MLH hosts our organizer conference Hackcon around the last weekend of August each year. If your event is on the same weekend as Hackcon we will not be able to partner with you. We are still happy to give advice leading up to the event, but our entire staff will be at the conference.

You will need:

What is this?

Pokemon Showdown is a way to play pokemon with others for free. We’re playing a format called Gen 8 Random Battles, which is where you’re given a random team of pokemon to fight with. It makes it much more random and silly, so this way almost everyone has a relatively fair shot at winning.

• Create a google form for your event that asks hackers to write down their discord name and their Pokemon Showdown name. Make sure to link it up to a spreadsheet so you have easy access to the list of members.

• Once you have the bracket setup, begin collecting signups from your hackers. Cut it off 5 minutes before the tournament start time.

• Add your participants by navigating to the “participants” tab. From there click the “Bulk add participants” option to easily copy and paste your winners in from the sheet for your form.

From there, you can start your bracket. You’ll be given a live link to your bracket that participants can navigate to. Have them reach out to their opponents and begin fighting in pokemon showdown in Gen 8 Random Battles.

****

• Give your hackers 15 minutes to begin their round 1 match. Non responders get Disqualified. Ask participants to report the results of their matches.

• Proceed down the bracket. Round 1 will have the most troubleshooting -- after that, it’s usually much calmer.

• For your grand finals match, ask your participants to post a link to watch the fight. Repost that link in your hackathon’s announcements with some hype around it, saying it’s the grand finals for the prestigious pokemon tournament!

• Award the winner the Pokemon Master role which you can easily make on Discord.

4 to 9 Months Before

4 months before

3 months before

2 months before

1 month before

• ​Get the Final Headcount​

1 week before

Game Day!

You will need:

• Access to Zoom/ Video streaming service

• Any web browser

• Code of Conduct appropriate articles to search for and SFW adjacent articles

Wikipedia Races:

The objective of this game is to try to get to a target Wikipedia article as quickly as possible using only links from your starting article and without any searches. To start, the Coach or MLHer staffing the mini event will announce the “finish line”.

For example, let’s say Kevin announces the target article is “Texas Hold ‘Em.” After that, all participants will go to their Wikipedia homepage, and click on the “Random article” link on the left hand side and the races will begin!

At which point, you’ll get your starting article:

And after many control f’s and several clicks, we got to the endpoint!

Feel free to repeat the races as many times as time permits, as long as hackers are engaged and having fun.

Setup

• Access to the MLH Zoom (see Coach cheat sheet)

• Access any web browser

• Code of Conduct appropriate articles to search for and SFW adjacent articles

Running the mini event

• Choose a starting and ending article on Wikipedia

• Let attendees try to navigate their way from the start page to the end page in ~5 minutes.

• Once a path has been found, ask them to go back into their search history and share with others how they got there.

Pro tips:

• Countries are a very easy first race

• Narrow down to make it harder, such as a celebrity

• If hackers finish at the same time, use # of clicks to clinch tiebreakers

Through supporting hundreds of hackathons around the world and working closely with the MLH Community, we’ve come up with the following Core Values that MLH and MLH Member Events share.

MLH Member Events serve as examples of excellence to other hackathons and communities around the world. By following these Core Values, they set an example of excellence and help create the highest quality experience possible for hackers, organizers, and sponsors alike.

MLH Member Events set a standard of excellence for attendees.

• Have a confirmed date and location that attendees can depend on.

• Events must be at least 24 hours and the venue must be available for attendees overnight.

• Have enough food on-site to reasonably feed attendees during the event.

• Events should provide healthy food options and have options available for hackers with dietary restrictions.

• Ensure that participants own any intellectual property they produce at the event.

• Clearly communicate any major changes to the event (Ex. venue, location, schedule, theme, etc.) as soon as they occur.

• Check in all attendees as they arrive at the event and make sure they have an up-to-date name, email, mobile phone number, and school for each of them.

• Have at least one lead organizer who has full ability to make decisions on-site at any time during the event.

MLH Member Events are open and accessible to all students.

• Do not have entry fees.

• Advertise well enough in advance for hackers in the area to learn about the event.

• Do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, social class, economic status, veteran status, disability, or age.

• Aren’t secret or invite-only events.

• Have a straightforward and publicly known general application process.

• Publish the criteria for admission to their event.

• Publish the rules and regulations for competing in their event.

MLH Member Events are fair.

• Organizers don’t compete in any event they are organizing. They extend the same rule to judges, sponsors, and other staff.

• Are open to hackers who are students at the time of the hackathon or who have graduated within the last 12 months. Students can include high school students, university undergraduate, postgraduate students, and people who are in vocational training such as apprenticeships. They welcome non-students as volunteers, mentors, sponsors, and judges.

MLH Member Events are safe and welcoming spaces.

• All organizers sign and agree to the MLH Code of Conduct.

• Have a clear and widely known reporting system for incidents.

• Have a link to the Code of Conduct on their website and ask all registrant to agree to the Code of Conduct during registration (e.g. a compulsory checkbox).

• Make it clear that the Code of Conduct extends to all attendees, including hackers, volunteers, organizers, sponsors, judges, mentors, and MLH staff.

• Make sure that bad actors and attendees who violate the Code of Conduct or rules will not attend the event.

• Respect and enforce the drug and alcohol laws and customs of the local country and only allow moderate alcohol consumption in locales where drinking is allowed.

• Have a first aid kit on-site during the event.

• If minors are attending, the child safeguarding requirements for the region/state have been met.

• Whenever possible, events provide sleeping spaces for attendees and encourage attendees to take advantage of them.

Creating an empowering environment where hackers of all skill levels can create amazing things is MLH’s main priority. The MLH Community Values codify this belief in a way that describes not only the MLH Member Events but also the types of events that MLH wants to work with because of their positive contributions to the student hacker movement.

Few of your planning decisions will truly make or break your hackathon, but your choice of venue is one of them. It often takes more time than expected to secure the right location, so the earlier you begin scouting, the better! Having a confirmed venue will also prove to potential sponsors and attendees that you’re serious about hosting a great event.

Keep in mind your venue should be free. In most cases, you should be able to find a university or company sponsored space.

Research Venues on Your Campus

On-campus venues are best because they’re accessible to your hackers and are usually free. Research past events at your school to get a sense of each venue's capabilities. Do they meet your hackathon’s requirements? Make a list of your favorites after considering pros and cons.

Note: Each venue usually has one university representative who oversees bookings. One shortcut to finding them is contacting students who previously held events at that space and asking how they recommend you proceed.

Enlist a Campus Advocate to Help You Navigate the Bureaucracy

A university advocate, such as a professor or dean, can significantly simplify your venue search by helping you navigate your school’s unique booking process.

In most cases, this person will be your organization’s advisor. You should have a quick elevator pitch that everyone on your organizing committee can give to campus representatives you'll be working with ("No, we will not be breaking into your bank account. A hackathon is…").

In a short email to potential advocates, you can include:

• A brief definition of a hackathon. We like to explain it as weekend long invention competition.

• The most relevant guide from the list above.

• Videos and/or photos from past events.

• At least 3 ways students will directly benefit from an on-campus hackathon.

Frame your hackathon as a recruiting event with a twist. Your school most likely already hosts a recurring career fair -- you can pitch your event relative to this terminology to immediately align it with your school’s goals.

What If You Can't Find an On-Campus Location?

On rare occasions, students may not be able to find a free on-campus venue. In this case, we recommend the following.

• Research venues in your area that have held events of a similar size: other hackathons, conferences, etc. If you know someone who organized one of these events, ask for an introduction to their director.

• Approach several companies that stand to gain something by sharing their space with you, such as a tech company that recruits programmers and designers. Your short email introduction should include the same information you sent to potential on-campus advocates:

  • A brief definition of a hackathon.

    • Libraries are expanding to more than just physical books. Find one with a Makerspace who might be interested in getting more people to try it out! These are a great fit for any Hardware focused hackathons.

  • Videos and/or photos of past events.

  • At least 3 ways students will directly benefit from using this location.

Whenever possible, avoid paying to rent a venue. With additional and hidden charges, it could easily double the cost of your hackathon. In addition to the rental fee, you will be responsible for providing all of the infrastructure required to run a large event, including Internet wiring, table and chair rental, and your own security team.

If you really can’t find a free venue, look into renting a coworking space with most of this infrastructure in place.

Double Check What Your Venue Provides

• Overnight — Is the venue aware that students will be staying overnight? Can hackers who need to sleep during the hackathon find a dedicated and safe place to do so?

• Enough capacity — The average MLH hackathon is around 300 student hackers. Can the venue accommodate the number of attendees you plan to host?

• The right physical space — Your venue must have space for hackers to work and listen to speakers, as well as designated areas for hardware, food, sponsors, and MLH.

• WiFi — Can the WiFi support a large number of people in a condensed space? It should be able to handle 4 devices per hacker.

• Power — Is there enough amperage for hundreds of computers, phones, and hardware devices? Assume you'll need at least 2.5 outlets per hacker.

• A/V equipment and staff— What A/V equipment is available? Does the venue offer staff to help you set it up?

• Tables and chairs — How many seats and tables do you need? Does the venue provide them, or do you need to rent from a separate vendor? Coordinate with your vendor to create a floor plan.

• Food— Does the venue offer catering? If it does, are you required to use it? How much will this cost?

• Accessibility — Can hackers in need of physical accommodation conveniently access the building?

• Security — Will there be a secure space where sponsors, organizers, and attendees can keep expensive equipment? Does the venue offer their own security, or do you need to find and pay for them?

If your venue lacks in some areas but is hosted on campus, you may be able to work with other branches of your administration to cover them. For example:

• Talk to your school's IT department about fortifying WiFi during your event or renting access points and switches. This can sometimes be done for free or with a security deposit. Supportive administration may help you set it up if requested.

• If you don't have access to the venue's fuse box, talk to the school's electricians to see if you can get special access or have one of them on site/on call.

• If you don't have enough extension cords or power strips, other organizations on campus may have them and be willing to lend them out. e.g. the organization that runs your school's career fair.

Ask About Venue Requirements and Restrictions

Most venues come with their own specific list of rules and required fees. In addition to confirming what your venue provides, a few questions to ask during your initial meeting with the venue bookers include:

• Can the venue confirm and guarantee a financial ceiling for any of your quotes?

• Does the building require you to pay for catering, security, a fire marshal, janitors, etc.?

  • Is food required to be from their caterer or can you bring in outside food?

• Does the venue have a loading dock for deliveries?

• Are there specific security regulations you must abide by?

• Are you permitted to host an overnight event? It’s important to let the potential venue know that people will be working in the space overnight. The key word here is "working" -- in many instances, it is against fire code to allow attendees to sleep.

• Does the venue require you or any sponsors attending to have insurance? Get the details and tell all parties you need this for as soon as possible.

MLH Tips

• Book early!

• Watch out for hidden fees and venue restrictions and requirements.

• Your venue should be free! Do everything in your power to ensure you don’t have to deal with the cost and logistical headache of paying for a space and everything that comes with it.

• Negotiate to reserve your venue for the day before so you have plenty of time to set up.

• Make sure your space is aware your will be hosting an overnight event.

Resources

Before you can begin asking for money, get a sense of how much cash you need to pull off your hackathon. This budget determines the sponsorship requirement for your hackathon, the logistical load of your organizing team, and the tools and services you have at your disposal.

Major Costs to Consider

• Food: This is one of the most significant costs and contributors to overall hacker experience at any hackathon. Everyone expects high quality food that respects their dietary restrictions.

  • Order enough food while not being wasteful. If you plan on ordering extra food, talk to a nearby shelter or student organization you can bring extras to after meal time. Keep in mind that you will have to do this quickly to keep the food safe for consumption.

  • You may want to order less food as the hackathon progresses to be cost efficient.
• • If it's your first time setting up a Discord server, some useful topics to create channels for include announcements, FAQs, general, resources, and sponsor-specific questions. Ask your HCM for tips about role permissions, attendee verification, and more!

• Swag: Short for "Stuff We All Get." These include t-shirts, stickers, water bottles, lanyards, and more. They're a great way to spread your hackathon branding and incentivize your hackers.

  • We recommend not getting white t-shirts as they frequently end up being see through depending on the quality.

• Prizes: We recommend awarding something that hackers can directly use to learn and grow for their personal development.

Note: We recommend you build in a buffer of $1,000 to $3,000, depending on the size of the event. In our experience, organizers will always need this extra money. If you don't, you now have a head start for next year!

Helpful Figures

Over the years we've found the averages costs for major budget items are as follows (US Hackathons):

• Food: $8-10 per person per meal

• Snacks & Drinks: $10 per person

• T-Shirts: $5-8 per person (dependent on volume)

• Buses: $3,500 per bus

Resources:

There are several legal considerations you should be aware of when planning your event. If you are a student club, we recommend consulting with an advisor from your university or high school on the following legal topics before your event.

• Donations

  • Is our school a 501(c)(3) nonprofit? If so, can our team accept donations? How can we accept donations?

• Insurance

  • Will our event be covered by our school's event insurance? Do we need hackers to sign any agreements before participating in the event?

• Sponsor Agreements

  • Who at our school should we contact to sign legal agreements on our behalf? How long is the review process?

• Finance

  • Where will our funds be kept? How can we access them? Are there any fees we should be aware of? What is the realistic timeline for how long it takes for us to actually use the funds that come into our account?

  • Are there any tax requirements we should be aware of? Do we need to keep our receipts?

• Age Restrictions

  • Do we need waivers for high schoolers to stay at our venue overnight?

If your team is not a student organization, we recommend consulting the MLH team to help you evaluate legal alternatives.

One common financial alternative is working with a fiscal sponsor - an existing 501(c)(3) nonprofit - to be granted their tax-exemption status and any additional financial and legal benefits. The fiscal sponsors listed below are designed to support hackathon teams. It is possible to partner with MLH while also being sponsored by any of these organizations.

Every first-rate hackathon has an exceptional leadership team behind it. When selecting yours, think like a startup CEO: choose enthusiastic and smart people with complementary skills. Think of your hackathon as your product and your team as the people putting it together. Here’s what a typical hackathon leadership team looks like:

• Hackathon Lead Organizer: The person in charge of all the happenings in and around the hackathon. They look after the entire team making decisions on what will be the next best steps in a particular situation.

• Logistics Team: This team is responsible for all logistics of the hackathon like booking the venue, developing and making the schedule, ordering swag, prizes, food and other essentials for the event etc.

• Finance Team: This team is responsible for securing sponsorships, making sure the vendors get paid according to the agreed timelines and managing the cash flow and budget.

• Marketing Team: This team is in charge of promoting the event, deciding the marketing strategy, developing the website, handling social media etc.

• Operations Team: This team is responsible for the hacker experience at the hackathon. Every aspect of what the hackathon looks and feels like, this team is entirely responsible for that. Keep in mind, hacker experience is usually the thing that can make or break your hackathon. We might like to call this the think tank of your hackathon team.

Leading your team

It’s vital to get your team onto the same page for your hackathon so you’re all working as a collective team rather than individual teams with different goals. To get there focusing on these specific areas would be highly beneficial:

• Project management: Ensure that all tasks are tracked for the entire team to see, we encourage you to

  • Avoid confusion and increase efficiency by making one person responsible for each team, managing the different day to day task/s within it.

  • Assign each team to lead different tasks on your project management tool (Trello, Notion, Asana etc.) with deadlines.

  • Follow up with each of the individual heads to get status updates on their tasks to keep them accountable.

• Staying Organized: Working towards organizing any event becomes difficult if there's any communication gap in your team. There are tons of ways to keep your hackathon planning team organized and on track. If your team is working remotely, it's even more important to have a system in place. The actual tools you use don't matter as much as picking them and sticking to it. As hackathon organizers, it can be easy to over-engineer your planning process. Keep in mind that sometimes the simplest solutions are the easiest for the whole team to adopt and use.

  Some tools we've seen work well for organizing teams are:

  • Chat: Slack, Discord

  • Documents: Google Drive (G-Suite, if possible), Notion, Airtable

  • Task Management: Asana, Notion, Trello

Your prospectus should:

• Be 2-3 pages long: Sponsors generally don't have time to read through a big sponsorship deck.

• Be legible: Less is more! Choose a uniform color scheme and keep text to a minimum on each slide.

• Highlight the Basics: Be sure to include the following info on all promotional materials — we can’t tell you how many times this gets overlooked!

  • Event name

  • Date

  • Projected attendance

  • Website URL

  • Contact email

• Cover the story behind your event: This includes a brief introduction to your team, what you’re trying to accomplish, and crucially, what makes your event unique.

• Include an overview of available sponsorships: Companies should be able to easily identify the benefits and differences between each tier and how much they cost.

  • We recommend including three sponsorship tiers: reasonable, moderate, and expensive. (Your most expensive tier should not be more than 25% of your budget.)

  • Let companies know that custom packages are available upon further negotiation with your team's email address. We recommend including this message at the bottom of the tier overview page for easy access.

Tier Breakdown

No two events' sponsorship prospectuses will be the same because your sponsor pools will be interested in different benefits. When assigning perks to your tiers, we recommend having each tier build upon the level directly below it. You'll get a better sense of how to optimize perks based on sponsor interest from previous iterations of your hackathon, but we suggest having your lowest tier start with a set of basic perks that fall under general, publicity, and recruitment categories.

Oftentimes, in-kind sponsors will offer to provide something that is essential to your event. This could include catering for an in-person event, the production of event swag, or even credits to host your event website or servers. While they may not directly provide money, these types of in-kind sponsorships can help to lower your overall event budget.

It is up to your team to evaluate whether or not this is worth it. We recommend evaluating the cost-benefit for you as organizers and for your hackers. Don't be afraid to go back to potential in-kind sponsors with counteroffers that your team is more comfortable with.

As a thought experiment, ask yourself if you would be willing to trade the flagship sponsorship of your event to a catering company in exchange for a free meal that would have otherwise cost you $5000. What about five free meals? What if they only want a logo on the back of your t-shirt, and not the flagship-level branding? Each event is different, and you will have to ask this question about any in-kind sponsor who comes your way.

If you expect a high volume of in-kind sponsors, you could consider developing in-kind sponsorship packages as part of your prospectus, or directly tying the value of their contribution to the existing value of one of your sponsorship packages. In the example above, perhaps you already have a $5000 sponsorship tier that you can offer to them instead of the flagship. Keep in mind, though, that the needs of a catering or t-shirt company might be very different than that of a recruiter or developer evangelist. You may need to modify your packages to fit their needs.

Our final recommendation is not to devalue your event sponsorships to please in-kind sponsors. Money has a specific, and quantifiable value for your event. You can directly use it to make your event better and improve the hacker experience. Be cautious of in-kind sponsors who seem to be overvaluing their contributions beyond what you might realistically spend on that budget line-item if you were not to accept their sponsorship.

Consider the following scenario. Perhaps there is a blog hosting company who has a free tier. In their free tier, the company logo is at the bottom of your blog. A competing blog hosting company comes to offer you an in-kind sponsorship of a superpowered blog with no company branding on it in exchange for the Gold Tier sponsorship at your event which includes a booth (or virtual speaking slot) and logo on your t-shirt and event website. It is not a clear win/lose scenario to choose between these two vendors, but you must ask yourself how valuable each of these things is to your event. If it is very important to you that your blog does not have external company branding on it, you might deem this a good deal. If you don't care about that type of branding, but you have a limited number of booths/speaking slots available at your event, maybe this is not a good deal.

Landing quality sponsorships is manageable if you break the process into small steps and give yourself plenty of lead time. The more practice you get approaching and negotiating with potential backers, the better you’ll become at the art of fundraising.

One thing to keep in mind as you work your way through this process: sponsors are like investors — they want to see you’re serious before they give you capital. In the same way you wouldn’t approach for venture capital without a product prototype, don’t reach out to sponsors until you’ve got evidence that your hackathon is well on its way to happening. Examples of this include a confirmed date and time, pre-registrations from students, etc.

With the right communication and target, you can expect a lot of positive response from the sponsors' side. Remember to be diligent about communicating with your sponsors at every step of the process. Explain to them the reasons for hosting your event, outline how you will support them throughout the event, and let them know about the success of other hackathons.

• Prize categories and Workshops are both major perks sponsors like to get involved in the hackathons they are supporting.

  • Example challenges/workshops can help them pick a topic that will have a greater impact on hackers. While they can offer a different one, a list of examples can help them if they do not know where to start.

  • Challenge Examples:

    • Best Use of X

      • X being their general API. Try not to have it be too specific as this will decrease the creativity of hackers.

    • Best Sustainability/Social Good/Educational/etc Hack

      • This can allow for a general topic the company wants to encourage hackers to incorporate into their hack.

  • Workshop Examples:

    • Resume Building/Cracking the Technical Interview

    • Day in the Life of a Software Dev

    • Intro to Python/GitHub/C#/AI/ML/Insert tech topic

    • Intro to *their API*

• You can also give sponsors their own channel on the chat platform (Slack/Discord) to talk to hackers, and have them introduce themselves so everyone knows who they are how they can be a resource for them throughout the event. They can get great interactions with hackers across the venue, answer questions specific to their challenge, apis, or workshop content, and share information specific to their role at the event.

• A good way to maintain company relations is by keeping in touch with them to give sponsors a chance to commit to supporting your event again the next year. We suggest sending your representatives an email of thanks to offer a recap of your event immediately after the hackathon, and rekindling this thread once you've started planning your next iteration.

Hackathons can find unique and fascinating ways of involving sponsors in different aspects of their event to benefit everyone involved. The range of perks you can offer your sponsors is limitless.

Running a Sponsored Prize

A sponsored prize track or category can significantly boost interest in your hackathon for the sponsors as well as the participants. For sponsors, this could result in new people contributing in unique ways towards their product. For hackers, this is an additional prize for them to aim for during the hackathon!

We recommend matching the value of your sponsors' prizes with the ones your team is providing for the event to avoid overshadowing other prize categories.

Sponsor Interactions

If your sponsors are running a prize track, request that they bring a representative who is familiar with their challenge so hackers can ask questions, get feedback, and talk to them about the track. This is the best way to guarantee meaningful interactions between hackers and sponsors, and often leads to better project quality and sponsor satisfaction.

We also recommend having your sponsors send someone to actively mentor and start conversations with hackers. You should also encourage them to monitor a sponsor-specific channel for their company in your Slack/Discord where they can respond at all times.

Workshops

This is a great way of keeping your hackers engaged and increasing the presence of your sponsors. Be mindful of balancing turnout with hacker morale; you will have a hard time getting anyone to attend a Sunday workshop (with Pitching Your Project or Submitting Your Project as the only exceptions) because hackers will be exhausted by then. Try to schedule all your workshops on Friday/Saturday and hold introductory workshops early on to give hackers enough time to experiment with what they learn.

Fun and Games

Recruiting

One perk many sponsors find valuable is strengthening their talent pipeline by talking to hackers. Depending on the time of year, your sponsors may be interested in participating in various opportunities. If a sponsor is primarily interested in recruiting, there are several ways to engage them. Some nonexhaustive ideas include:

• Resume critiques – Office hours where recruiters help hackers edit and perfect their resumes.

• 1:1 Recruiter/Sponsorship Fair – A dedicated space where hackers can chat with sponsors/ recruiters about anything: their resume, job expectations, company culture, etc.

• Interviews – If you’re providing resumes in advance, your recruiters may be interested in interviewing your hackers during the event. We recommend using a dedicated office-style space to respect the privacy of the interview process.

Sponsorship is one of the most crucial parts of every hackathon. When you're reaching out to sponsors, it's necessary to understand their perspective of supporting your hackathon and the outcome they're expecting out of it. You should consider this as a sales pitch for your hackathon. To understand it further, let's first understand the different types of sponsors hackathons generally target to.

Hackathons target five categories of sponsors:

• Financial/ Monetary Sponsors — Companies that pay for services like having their logo on your website (most sponsors fall into this category).

• Presenting Sponsors — Companies that co-host or co-brand your event (be careful not to give up too much control here). Think of them as a premium Fiscal Sponsor.

• In-kind Sponsors — Companies that donate services or goods like hardware or platform credits for free.

• Strategic/ Media Partners — Companies that help with marketing and promotion; often publications.

• Community Partners — Companies that can help you recruit hackers, mentors, judges, or volunteers from their community for free.

Please note that these are all broad categories and there will be sponsors that can fit into multiple categories at once as well.

We often see companies attempting to give away free credits or swag to avoid paying a sponsorship fee. We recommend steering clear of these engagements or evaluating these opportunities on a case-by-case basis using the guide we wrote for you below.

Once you have enough information about what category a sponsor fits in, you should try to understand what their goal or primary reason might be to support your hackathon.

Who should I be reaching out to?

Sponsors support hackathons for three primary reasons:

• To get real-time feedback on their products, especially APIs and development tools. To find people with these goals, target job titles containing Developer Relations/Dev Rel or Developer Advocate. These people generally are familiar with hackathons and have a budget to attend them, but is usually a more niche/harder to find role.

• To recruit interns and full-time employees, especially during the fall season. To find people with these goals, target job titles like Hiring, Recruiting, Talent Acquisitions, or HR. These people typically have the budget, but will likely need more explanation on what a hackathon is.

• To raise awareness (or change the perception) of their brand/ product or service. To find people with these goals, target job titles containing Marketing or Public Relations, or an Employee Resource Group related to your primary event demographic. These people typically have a budget, but will need more information on how they are making a difference. Photos from previous events will help more with these pitches.

Apart from these three primary reasons, sponsors may want to support an event because they align with your community values, want increased engagement with their product, or have region targeted goals. Sponsors in this last category are typically companies that have a strong local presence at your college and/or career fairs. Working with them to send specific stats about your event to help their process can be a great way to improve your chances of sponsorship.

Understanding how to target and cater to your sponsors is essential to forming your approach to addressing the most common concerns they raise.

Sponsors’ top practical concerns:

1. Attendee Value

   • Are your hackathon’s attendees a good fit for the company in terms of recruiting, marketing, etc.?

   • How hard is it for companies to reach this audience without your help? What unique bridge does your event offer between the sponsor and their target population?

2. Who else is sponsoring?

   • Depending on the sponsor, your other backers will matter. Some companies prefer to sponsor events their competitors sponsor, whereas others want to ensure they’re the biggest name on your roster.

3. Package Value

   • Are they getting their money’s worth?

4. The Force (a.k.a. their gut feel)

   • How do the sponsors feel about your competency: is the event well-organized so far? Have you been professional in all communications?

1. Do Your Research

• Compile a list of potential sponsors.

  • Search your network (LinkedIn is a great tool for this).

  • Check in with career services at your university — which companies sponsor tech job fairs on your campus?

  • Diversify your sponsor profile by reaching out to startups, midsized enterprises, and large enterprises.

  • Make fundraising announcements to your community.

2. Get In Touch

• Send a well-crafted, thoughtful email.

  • Remember to include an introduction of yourself so sponsors know who they're talking to!

  • Your first email should NEVER contain links, hyperlinks, attachments, or images. Many companies have IT policies that automatically trash new external emails with these to prevent phishing. Do not send your sponsorship prospectus, meeting invite link, website link, image in signature, etc. in your first email. Include them in a follow-up message 1-2 weeks after the initial email!

• Reach out to the relevant decision maker at each company. When in doubt, email the CEO.

  • Other useful job titles:

    • Developer Relations - aka Dev Rel

    • Marketing/Recruiting/HR

  • These contacts will either directly have the budget to support your event or know who to put you in touch with.

• Follow up: don’t worry if you don’t receive a response to your initial email! Your contact may have lost your email or simply had a busy week. Wait 1-2 weeks (3-4 days if close to your event date) and ask again; you should ping the contact up to 3 times.

3. Hop on an Exploratory Phone Call

• Help the sponsor understand what a hackathon is. Offer analogies such as comparing it to a science fair.

• Sell your team and your story. What makes your hackathon special?

  • Get the prospect excited about the event. Be sure to share personal experiences about the impact and takeaways of hackathons.

• Ask about success metrics. What did they ask for in previous sponsorships?

• Let them do the talking! You’ll figure out the company's primary values this way.

  • Prompt your contact with guiding questions. You want to make the call as conversational as possible so you can learn their goals while sharing your own experiences and expertise to build trust and credibility.

• Don’t be afraid to ask for their budget. "Given the times you’ve sponsored events similar to this one, what have you spent and what did you get out of it?"

• Before you hang up, schedule a follow-up call.

4. Make A Proposal

• Do this immediately after your call. Sometimes it’s as easy as sending over your prospectus and highlighting the pre-made packages most relevant to that particular company. Other times, you’ll have to put together a custom proposal.

• Explain why your proposal is a good fit for the sponsor.

• Give your sponsorship deadline.

5. Follow Up And Track Your Progress

• Email a week or two after sending your initial proposal by offering to answer questions.

• Track your emails with a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool, an email service like Boomerang, or a manual platform like Excel.

• When a sponsor says yes, invoice them immediately. Create a contract for them to finalize their funding amount and method of payment. Make sure they are paying to an account you can easily access with a currency you can accept.

Until an event has a website, it doesn’t exist to most people. Publishing a basic website the second you’ve committed to hosting a hackathon will help you drive interest to it, capture potential attendee email addresses, and answer questions from interested students. You don't have to be technically skilled to set this up! We've included a template at the bottom of this page.

Think about your hackathon as a movie. You first release a teaser, then a trailer and then on the eventful weekend, the movie releases! This website will serve as a teaser for your event - the first step to spark a huge interest in your hackathon.

The first iteration of your site should include:

• Event Date: If you don't have an exact date, try to include at least the month of your hackathon.

• Email Support: You should keep a team inbox to answer hacker questions. This will have a great impact on the word of mouth marketing.

• Social Media: Links to your event’s social media accounts. Common platforms include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Staying active on these platforms helps hackers remember your event is coming up.

• Release Date: A date for visitors to check back for more information.

• Sponsor Interest Page: A page just for sponsors, including:

  • An email address for sponsorship inquiries.

  • Some information about your event and your team.

Resources:

A typical hackathon website contains the following sections:

• Landing Page: The landing page contains your hackathon's name, logo, dates, and most importantly, your hacker registration form. We also suggest including supplementary information like judging and mentorship interest forms.

• About the Hackathon: This section is a space for the lengthier information about your hackathon, including the event's ambitions and motivations, a short reference of your team, etc.

• Sponsors: This section lends professional credibility to your hackathon by featuring your sponsor companies. Including brand assets and links to each sponsor's website is a great way to thank them for their support.

• FAQ: A well-written FAQ can reduce the load of your support emails and is a crucial read for anyone attending your hackathon. The following bulletpoints are formatted to be easy to copy and paste, but you should customize as needed to fit your event.

  • Is HACKATHON NAME free to attend?

    • Yes! Food will be provided for the duration of the event. We will also have swag and prizes!

  • Where is the event? Is it in person or virtual? Where can I park?

    • The event is located in the XXXX Building at STREET ADDRESS.

    • You can park in Lot X,Y, Z which you can see on this campus parking site - LINK

  • Who can attend? What if I don't have any experience? Do I have to be 18?

    • This event is open to any students. It is beginner friendly, with workshops to help you learn during the event, and mentors available to help you as you work on your project.

    • Attendees must be at least 13 years old due to child privacy laws. If under 18, you will need to fill out this liability form from the university to participate - LINK.

  • What is the team size limit?

    • Teams should be between 1 and 4 people. We will have a team building activity right after opening ceremony if you'd like to find team members!

  • Are there travel reimbursements?

    • We are not able to provide travel reimbursements at this time.

  • What should I bring?

    • Your laptop, charger, headphones, deodorant, and a pillow/blanket.

  • When can we start working on our project? Can I work on a previous project?

    • You cannot start until after opening ceremony. You may come up with ideas, but are not allowed to start coding. You cannot work on a previous project, but can use frameworks if you clearly credit them in your readme and differentiate what you made vs what you used.

  • How many challenges can I apply for?

    • As many as you want!

  • Do I have to stay overnight?

    • No, you can leave and come back if you would prefer.

  • What kind of activities will there be?

    • We will post the schedule closer to the event. There will be workshops and activities to take a break and meet other hackers and our wonderful sponsors.

  • What is a hackathon?

    • A hackathon is an event where students "hack" together and create an app, website, game, etc. in 24-48 hours. There will be no malicious "hacking".

  • Will hardware be available?

    • We do not have hardware available, but you are welcome to bring your own. Due to building fire codes, soldering kits are not allowed in the venue.

  • Are you sending out acceptances? Is there a deadline to apply? Is there a waitlist?

    • We will send out acceptances XX days before the event. If you need earlier confirmation to book travel, please reach out to our team at EMAIL ADDRESS. Applications will close once we reach the maximum amount of hackers we can support, but we will open a waitlist on the day of the event for any local hackers who want to fill the spots of any accepted hackers who do not end up attending.

  • How do I sign up to be a mentor/judge/volunteer?

    • You can sign up here - LINK

  • I have a different question!

    • Email us at EMAIL ADDRESS!

• Footnotes: This section generally contains all the important documentation of your hackathon including the rules, code of conduct, support emails and/ or any contact form.

Regular website updates

Ideally, you’ve been updating your site on a rolling basis as more details get finalized. This is a great way to keep your hackers engaged and motivated to check out all the offerings at your hackathon. You'll want to add the following sections at least a month ahead of your event for the best hacker experience.

• Schedule: This is a great way to increase visibility and keep hackers informed of what to expect at different times during your hackathon. You should be prepared to make live edits on the weekend of your event to reflect last minute delays or room changes.

• Venue Address and Map: An address can help hackers from other universities find your building. A map highlighting areas for workshops, hacking, and sleep is also strongly encouraged.

• Prizes: Get your hackers excited by publicizing your prizes!

• Tracks: Let hackers know about the different themes they can work upon during the hackathon.

• Speakers, Judges & Mentors: It's best to include information about the different people attending your hackathon with different roles to thank them and let hackers know of their presence. This will also help on the day of to manage hacker interaction.

MLH Tips:

• You should update this site on a rolling basis as you land speakers and sponsors, create your schedule, confirm transportation offerings, etc.

• As early as possible, celebrate what differentiates your event.

Creating a brand guideline and design theme for your hackathon can be one of the most rewarding ways to get your hackers excited for your event.

Your design is only as impactful as how accessible and recognizable it is to your hackers. Coming up with your hackathon's website and brand identity always starts with accessibility. Fortunately, there are many public resources that streamline the process of checking for and implementing web and visual accessibility measures. We've compiled a list of some of the most relevant ones below.

• Web Accessibility
• Visual Accessibility

A bonus of building your web and design foundations on top of accessibility considerations is avoiding common pitfalls later on. Simplifying your design by cutting out visually complex details and using contrasting colors will make swag production and publicity much cheaper and easier.

Finally, your design should express how memorable and unique your event is. Pick a visual motif and color palette that can be reused from year to year to maintain the continuity of your event! Using a fun mascot and cohesive gradient creates an engaging website that you can also tie in with your in person decorations.

Subject: Are you interested in attending a hackathon in [LOCATION]?

Hello!

On DATE to DATE we will be hosting HACKATHON at LOCATION. Over the course of the weekend, we'll have mini-events, workshops, free food, swag, and more. Whether you've been to tons of hackathons or you're thinking about attending your first, [HACKATHON] would love to have you.

Find out more and register here! [INSERT LINK]

You can also see sneak peeks of swag and sponsors attending on our socials at [LINK]

Happy Hacking,

The [HACKATHON] Team

Before setting any timelines, you have to set up goals of targeting your hackers. These can be limited to your university, city, state, country or a certain region. We recommend focusing on your local community first and then expanding from there. This makes sure that your roots are strong and you're ready to expand with your hackathon!

As you plan your marketing timeline, keep in mind that you will see a drop-off rate between the number of hackers who signed up to attend your event and the number who participate. The attrition rate varies from event to event, but in general, we expect about a 50% drop-off rate for free hackathons.

In general, we recommend aiming to have 100% of your goal attendance signed up two weeks before the event and 200% of your attendance goal signed up one week in advance. We also recommend having an upper limit to the number of registrations you can expect. Having some kind of a filtering process for attendees helps a lot in ensuring the quality and interest in participation.

For example, if you're aiming to have 500 attendees, a good timeline may be:

Keep in mind that MLH requires registration 1 week before the event for events we partner with so we can prep the pre-event email and complete a check for bad actors. Ask your HCM if you have any questions!

Follow-ups and reminders can be different for your hackathon. These all depend on the registration, pre registration and other significant events within your hackathon. Please keep in mind not to spam your attendees because that affects your hackathons' experience significantly.

The first follow-up we recommend is for the hackers who have done the pre registration for your hackathon, informing them to register for the hackathon after the main registrations are up. We recommend sending out just 1 or a maximum of 2 follow-ups, which should be also cross referenced from your current registered hackers' list and sent to those who have not registered.

The other follow-up is for the last years' attendees informing them about the new iteration of your hackathon and asking them to register for it. The follow-ups here should be similar to what you do for the pre registered hackers, first one done while rolling out the registrations and the second one during the last month to the hackathon.

For the registered participants, the follow-up looks a bit different. To keep them excited we recommend informing them about the major happenings within your hackathon, but again that email should also be confined to a maximum of 1 where you can also ask them to stay in touch by joining the social handles of the event.

Finally, a week before your hackathon, it is the perfect time to remind everyone involved about what needs to happen at the event. Be sure to reach out to the different people involved according to their role at the event:

• Attendees: Send clear instructions about when and where to check-in.

• Sponsors: Sponsors also need clear instructions about when and where to check-in.

• Volunteers and Fellow Organizers: Confirm all volunteer sign-up and designated duties. Send clear instructions about when and where to report.

• Judges and Speakers: Check-in times and overview of what they should expect day-of.

It's important to have a clear check-in process day-of so you know who is attending. This data is valuable for your team and stakeholders in your event. For your team, it gives you a clear demarcation of who actually attended the event and finally who submitted. These stats help you know what exactly has been the reach for your event. For the sponsors, this data is again highly beneficial to know how many people actually got to know about their offering vs how many utilized them.

If you have already gathered all the fields you need from attendees, there a ton of ways to gather check-ins. If you missed a data category like address or age at registration, you can use check-in as an opportunity to get that info.

Check-in Time!

Check-ins for physical events are important to make sure you know who is at the venue. Having lanyards, wristbands, or nametags can help identify who is supposed to be at the venue, and also help put names to people who meet at the event.

Organizers can have volunteers set up at table/s depending on the size. Make sure to have plenty of space for a line, and that it is spread out enough from sponsor tables that the area will not get congested with the initial flood of hackers.

Have a way for the volunteers to verify the attendees have registered. A simple ctrl+f for the name in a google spreadsheet with a column to mark with an X is an easy way to set up check-in. Have assorted stickers/swag hackers can grab while volunteers are completing the check-in process. If your event requires school/state ID to verify identity this would be the time to check.

If your hackers need to write down their name have a table or two with lots of sharpies on the side that they can go to after they check in. Some hackers may take a bit more time for this step (especially if their hands are full of stickers/swag) and you do not want to clutter up the check in lin.

Consider having a separate form for late registrations, even if they have to wait until after all preregistered attendees have had time to check-in. Everyone checking in should still complete your full registration form.

Every event has different ways to engage hackers. Having challenges for specific topics can help hackers come up with where to get started on what type of project they want to make, and can encourage them to try out things they would not have considered before. Challenges like this are usually only one winner, and you should try and make sure 1 team is not the winner of multiple tracks where possible.

You should try and have sponsors or partners provide these challenges where possible. Not only does it keep your budget down, it also gets them directly involved! You also want to avoid having 20 different tracks at your event, as judging will quickly get messy. You should aim for 3 tracks if you have no sponsor tracks and are not doing an overall 1st, 2nd, 3rd. If sponsors/partners are helping with judging you can have more, but be cognizant of how chaotic judging deliberations can be with many categories.

Let's review some example challenges and descriptions

• Best Sustainability Hack

  • This sustainability challenge invites you to develop a hack that provides an innovative and practical solution that promote sustainable development.

• Best Accessibility Hack

  • This accessibility challenge invites you to develop a hack that promotes accessibility and inclusion for people.

• Best First-Time Hack

  • This best first time hacker challenge is made to welcome new hackers (and those who work with beginners)! You are eligible for this category if at least half of your team is made of 1st time hackers.

• Best Data Hack

  • Come and impress us with your data visuals! Create a data visualization in your hack, or use data in a unique and innovative way.

• Best Web3 Hack

  • Build a decentralized application and share it with the world! Create something using blockchain for this challenge.

• Best AI Hack

  • This challenge invites you to develop an AI, or use an existing AI in your project. Be clear in your submission on what you created vs public tools you utilized in your project.

• Best Hardware Hack

  • Using your preferred hardware or hardware emulator, build a hack of your choice.

• Best Design

  • This design challenge invites you to develop a hack with innovative and visually appealing user interfaces (UI) and user experiences (UX).

• Best Engagement

  • This challenge is for the attendee/s that attend the most events during the hackathon. Events include workshops, keynotes, career fairs, and fun activities. If it is on the schedule, then it counts towards this challenge!

    The purpose of this challenge is to show our hackers that you don't need to build a project at a hackathon to participate and have fun.

  • This does require extra work by your team throughout the event so you can track engagement. QR codes at each activity, a secret code they enter in a form, or another way to track attendance is needed for this challenge.

• Jankiest Quick Fix

  • For the thrown together "If it isn't broke don't touch it" projects

  • Have a screwdriver for the prize as a fun themed tie in.

• Best Transportation/Urban Life Hack

  • This challenge invites you to develop a hack with innovative way to impact transportation or urban life. For example, a new way to connect with your neighbors, a new way to incentivize or improve public transportation, etc.

• Best Food Hack

  • This challenge invites you to develop an innovative hack related to food. For example, a way to reduce food waste, a way to find new places to eat, etc.

• Best Art Hack

  • This challenge invites you to develop a hack related to art. For example, a new way to find pop up art exhibits, a place to learn more about historical pieces, etc.

Some of your hackers may have dietary restrictions that will require you to provide special accommodations. Make sure you ask anyone receiving a meal (hackers, mentors, volunteers) about their dietary restrictions before the event, so you can prepare meals with your food vendors accordingly.

Types of Dietary Restrictions

• Vegetarian - No meat, and sometimes other animal products.

• Vegan - No food derived from animals.

• Celiac Disease - No gluten (a protein found in wheat, rye, and barley).

• Allergies - Common allergies that you may run into include: Lactose and peanut allergies.

• Kosher - The Hebrew word “kosher” means fit or proper as it relates to Jewish dietary law.

• Halal - Foods that are allowed to be consumed under Islamic dietary guidelines.

Ordering Meals

Once you have a list of the individuals at your event with dietary restrictions you’ll need to accommodate at your event, you can either:

1. Request one-off meals from your existing food vendors to accommodate the dietary restriction. For example, you may need to ask your food vendor to provide 3 kosher pre-packed meals.

2. If your food vendor can not accommodate a particular dietary restriction, we recommend providing any hackers affected with a gift card to purchase food from an external food vendor. For example, if your food vendor can’t provide one of your hackers with a kosher meal then you could give that hacker a GrubHub gift card to purchase their own dinner. If you go with this method, you should notify the hacker that they will be responsible for purchasing their food before the event so they can prepare accordingly.

Distributing Meals

We recommend that you store any meals that are specifically for folks with dietary restrictions at another table to avoid them being accidentally taken by the wrong person. We recommend printing out a list of hackers with dietary restrictions and checking off names as you hand them out, so you can ensure that the meals are being distributed to the right people.

Things to Print Before

• Signage -some pointing left, right, or blank so you can fill in the arrow as you place them

  • Checkin (include some pointing up to put on glass doors or in an elevator)

  • Bathrooms

  • Hacker Space

  • Food/Snacks

  • Mentors

  • Organizers Only

  • Do Not Enter

  • Workshops

• Lanyards- having different colors or designs helps differentiate hackers from staff

  • Organizers

  • Volunteers

  • Mentors

  • Judges

  • Sponsors

  • Hackers

  • Blank(if the above run out for some reason have 10-15 blank)

• Parking Passes(if needed)

• Minor Forms(if needed)

• Table Numbers (for Judging) - better to over than under print these

Before the Event

Here are common supplies you should have for your hackathon

• First Aid Kit

• Permanent Markers

• Paper

  • Last minute signage

  • Give out wifi

  • Parking passes

  • Link to Discord

• Box Cutters / Scissors

  • To open all your/your sponsors swag

• Painters Tape

  • Do not use Scotch tape on paint. It will rip away the paint and make your venue mad. It also is not likely to last the full event

• Gaffer's Tape

  • Secure electrical cords if they absolutely have to be across walkways

• Duct Tape

  • Jack of all trades tape. DO NOT USE ON PAINT

It's important to check that the various tools you're using for your event are ready to go day-of. A dry run of the whole event largely can also help your team be prepared to handle everything and let you know about any bottleneck that might create problems later on.

Day-Of

• Set up tables and chairs

• Make sure WiFi is working (or set it up)

• Check power at every table (may need to lay cable)

• Check-in station

• Sponsor and swag area

• Hackathon space

• Speaking area

• Judging space

• Hardware room or table

• Food area

• AV and tech

• Relaxation area (if providing)

• Help desk/info center

• Meditation room

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.

In summary: include date, location, website URL, and key points like workshops, prizes, food, and swag!

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. Flyers are usually ignored the first few times people see them, so more flyers means you are more likely to get people to actually read it.

• 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.

• 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!

  • You can also get more from these groups to attend if you invite the clubs to run a workshop or volunteer. You can get subject matter experts hosting the workshops so you can focus on the logistics of running your event day of! As a bonus, they will market their workshop as part of your 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

• 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.

• 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!

  • Ask other hackathons to tweet or post about you.
• 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.

Typeform or Google Forms costing you money due to your event size? Worried about hackers trying to steal your data if you build your own platform? Want quick setup of registrations so you can make your registration live quickly?

Some perks of OHQ:

• It is free!

• OHQ automatically has all the required MLH fields

  • This has the added benefit of being faster for hackers to register if they have an MLH account already

• You can add custom questions of your own

• You can also use the dashboard to see how marketing efforts are going

• You can export the data at any time

• Update the image and descriptions to point back to your website

• Use it for easy checkin

• You can add anyone on your team so they can help you manage it

Reach out to league@mlh.io for help getting this set up for your event or if you have any further questions. You can also be added as a team member on the example event if you would like to test it out!

Let's see some screenshots

Dashboard

Check in on how marketing is going! You can see spikes in registrations to see what is working best for marketing. You can also use it day of to keep track of how many attendees have checked in.

Easy Export and Custom Question Functionality

You can see hackers who register, add new attendees manually (if you need to add someone new the day of your event at check-in for example), and utilize this page for Rejections and Checking in Hackers. You can export your registrations at any time using the Export button, which emails you a .csv of the hackers.

If a hacker already has an account(from attending another event or participating in Global Hack Week), they only have to answer additional questions you can see in the question tab on this example event. You can see all the information for them when they register for your event. You can also add your own questions.

This next preview is of the example export. It will include all registrants in the same file, but for privacy reason we only included 1 example registration with mock data.

Getting in registrations does not only make sure you have a participation pool to pass on updates for your event, rather, it is about the community you're forming around it. Every hacker that attends your hackathon becomes a member of your community and stays as one as long as you're interacting with them in the right way. For growing as a hackathon, you need to grow as a community which mean every individual needs to grow!

We recommend organizers to start some pre-registration process before they launch the main hackathon website. This helps capture the emails of interested hackers much before the main registrations start. Getting in just name and emails should be good enough for this particular process. We recommend having hackers create MyMLH accounts so organizers don't have to manually collect hackathon-relevant data such as school names and shipping addresses.

As the main registration process starts, it is vital to get in some demographic details of the attendees of your hackathon. Collecting data is useful for your team's ability to understand the demographics of your event. This can be typically beneficial while projecting your sponsors with your demographic charts and letting them know the impact your hackathon has had on the different sectors of the society. It is also extremely useful while going for targeted marketing for your event as you know the interested audience and their involvement with your hackathon. OHQ is a useful tool to set up your hackathon and easily manage registrations and check-ins that is compatible with MyMLH profiles. Reach out to your Hackathon Community Manager to hear more about using OHQ and MyMLH!

Statistically about 50% of hackers that register for events show up. They may make plans, decide not to attend last minute, or feel like there is no loss not coming to a free event they previously signed up for. Take this into account and aim for double the amount of registrations. Also make a plan for what to do if you have more sign ups than your event is being planned for. Do not go over double of your aimed attendance. If you exceed your initial goals you might need to make a waitlist. Try to give priority to hackers who are closer to your event since they are more likely to actually show up.

Please note: As with all personal data, use the utmost care to keep participant data safe. We recommend hackathons to use the personal data just for the day of communication and not share it with anyone until you get specific permission from your hackers to do so.

Important Registration Fields

These are required to be in the format detailed below for MLH Member Events

• First Name

  • It is important to have these fields split. Some people go by multiple first names/last names. For example Maria Anne De La Cruz. If this was 1 line we would have to manually split the field.

• Last Name

• Age

  • We recommend this as a dropdown with specific ages instead of date of births. MLH needs this data for eligibility purposes (some codes are only available to hackers 18+). We do not collect dates of birth as part of event registration to reduce data risk.

• Phone Number

  • In case you need to call someone during the event. This may also be needed if you have to send a message to all participants for some reason (for example weather related emergency notification).

• Email

  • So you can communicate before and after the event. Location, schedule, feedback, etc.

• • • For example some universities can have multiple versions of the name. Each will show as a different option, and will skew your demographic data showing how many students came from each school.

      • The University of Texas at Dallas

      • University of Texas at Dallas

      • UTD

      • UTDallas

• Level of Study - instead of or in addition to Graduation Year

  • Less than Secondary / High School

  • Secondary / High School

  • Undergraduate University (2 year - community college or similar)

  • Undergraduate University (3+ year)

  • Graduate University (Masters, Professional, Doctoral, etc)

  • Code School / Bootcamp

  • Other Vocational / Trade Program or Apprenticeship

  • Post Doctorate

  • Other

  • I’m not currently a student

  • Prefer not to answer

• Country of Residence

  • We recommend this as a dropdown. It’s okay to put your hackathon’s country at the top for ease of use.

  • Again be careful not to have users type input, or you will get a million answers for the same countries.

    • US

    • USA

    • United States

    • Unites States of America

• LinkedIn URLs

  • Ask hackers to provide their LinkedIn URL to be able to connect with partners post-event for potential job opportunities.

MLH Checkboxes

MLH Member Events also are required to have 3 checkboxes. 2 of them hackers MUST agree to. The 3rd is optional (they can agree or disagree), but we require it to be in your registration form.

Please add the following disclaimer and 3 checkboxes if you plan to work with us. You can remove the disclaimer once you have moved into our official Membership Stage(Talk with your HCM if you have questions).

"We are currently in the process of partnering with MLH. The following 3 checkboxes are for this partnership. If we do not end up partnering with MLH, your information will not be shared"

• “I authorize MLH to send me occasional emails about relevant events, career opportunities, and community announcements."

Optional Demographic Fields

• Dietary Restrictions (For in-Person events - see more about planning for dietary restrictions in our Event Logistics section!)

  • Vegetarian

  • Vegan

  • Celiac Disease

  • Allergies

  • Kosher

  • Halal

• Do you identify as part of an underrepresented group in the technology industry?

  • Yes

  • No

  • Unsure

• Gender

  • Man

  • Woman

  • Non-Binary

  • Prefer to self-describe

  • Prefer Not to Answer

• Pronouns - Adding pronouns should always be optional

  • She/Her

  • He/Him

  • They/Them

  • She/They

  • He/They

  • Prefer Not to Answer

  • Other (let them fill in themselves)

• Race/ Ethnicity

  • Asian Indian

  • Black or African

  • Chinese

  • Filipino

  • Guamanian or Chamorro

  • Hispanic / Latino / Spanish Origin

  • Japanese

  • Korean

  • Middle Eastern

  • Native American or Alaskan Native

  • Native Hawaiian

  • Samoan

  • Vietnamese

  • White

  • Other Asian (Thai, Cambodian, etc)

  • Other Pacific Islander

  • Other (Please Specify)

  • Prefer Not to Answer

• Do you consider yourself to be any of the following?

  • Heterosexual or straight

  • Gay or lesbian

  • Bisexual

  • Different identity ________

  • Prefer Not to Answer

• What is the highest level of formal education that you have completed?

  • Less than Secondary / High School

  • Secondary / High School

  • Undergraduate University (2 year - community college or similar)

  • Undergraduate University (3+ year)

  • Graduate University (Masters, Professional, Doctoral, etc)

  • Code School / Bootcamp

  • Other Vocational / Trade Program or Apprenticeship

  • Other (please specify)

  • I’m not currently a student

  • Prefer not to answer

• T-shirt Size (If shipping t-shirts)

  • Specify the US/ UK sizes here

• Shipping Address (If shipping prizes or swag)

  • Address Line 1

  • Address Line 2

  • City

  • State

  • Country

  • Pincode

• Major/Field of Study

  • Computer science, computer engineering, or software engineering

  • Another engineering discipline (such as civil, electrical, mechanical, etc.)

  • Information systems, information technology, or system administration

  • A natural science (such as biology, chemistry, physics, etc.)

  • Mathematics or statistics

  • Web development or web design

  • Business discipline (such as accounting, finance, marketing, etc.)

  • Humanities discipline (such as literature, history, philosophy, etc.)

  • Social science (such as anthropology, psychology, political science, etc.)

  • Fine arts or performing arts (such as graphic design, music, studio art, etc.)

  • Health science (such as nursing, pharmacy, radiology, etc.)

  • Other (please specify)

  • Undecided / No Declared Major

  • My school does not offer majors / primary areas of study

  • Prefer not to answer

Here is an example email for the week before your event. Remember to adjust timings for volunteers, judges, sponsors, etc.

Communication Platform

Pick a communication platform and ensure your hackers join it. Slack and Discord are two of the most popular. We recommend Discord for your event because of their free voice chat capabilities.

Before joining and once on the platform, make hackers know that their behavior and actions are still subject to MLH Code of Conduct, and to be respectful. Digital spaces can increase harassment as people are hidden behind a computer, so it is key to make sure your attendees know you still take this seriously.

At a minimum include the following channels on your platform:

• Team-Formation: Channel for hackers to form teams

• Carpool-Search: Channel for hackers to find a ride from other hackers

• Ask-Organizers: Channel for hackers to ask organizers any questions that come up throughout the event.

• Introductions: Channel for hackers to introduce themselves. Have your team set the norm for this by introducing yourselves.

• Random: Channel for anything that isn't hackathon related.

• Ask-Mentors: Channel for hackers to connect with mentors when they need help on their projects.

• Mentors-Internal: Channel for mentors to talk with each other and with organizers.

• Admin: Channel for your organizing team. We recommend creating an admin voice channel as well!

Here is an example from an event Discord!

• Note that there are 2 "sponsor" channels here so that sponsors have a dedicated space to talk about their api's or workshops.

Food is an important part of a hacker’s experience. Shared meals can help bring hackers together, and give them the brain fuel they need to build their projects. Each food vendor will have different order requirements and delivery schedules. Below are some recommendations to help you have a successful relationship with your food vendors.

Venue Requirements

Often times venues will require you to use their catering services, especially universities. Before you start to evaluate food vendors or put in any orders, make sure you see if your venue has any requirements first.

Ordering

We recommend that you place your order 2-4 weeks prior to your event. If you use the venue's catering company, they may require you to finalize your order sooner.

Delivery If your vendor is delivering the food to your venue, make sure you are scheduling the drop-off at least 30-60 minutes before you plan to serve the food. You don’t want the food to get cold, but you also want to allow enough buffer time in case the delivery arrives late.

When you put in your food order, you should be specific about where the food should be delivered and who they should contact upon arrival. Give them a backup phone number in case the first organizer doesn’t pick up.

If your food vendor is providing a family-style meal (on large platters meant for sharing, rather than as individual plates) they will need more time to set up. We recommend scheduling the drop-off for 60-90 minutes prior to the meal start time. In this case, we don’t have to worry about food getting cold because it’s likely they will be using chafing dishes to warm up the food. However, some venues have restrictions on the use of chafing dishes due to them involving flammable material, so check the rules before you plan on using them.

Distributing Meals

If your food vendor is providing a family-style meal make sure you coordinate with them on who will be serving the food. Some vendors like university catering services have special requirements that require you to utilize their staff for food distribution and preparation.

When putting in the initial order, make sure to ask how the food vendor how they would like you to return the chafing dishes, table cloths, and other reusable goods. If they plan on picking up the goods after the meal and helping you clean up, make sure you coordinate a time in advance. You don’t want to be left with tables full of leftover food, and dishes after a meal with no plan.

We recommend also getting allergen details and posting a "Menu" at checkin so hackers can see what the options are for meals ahead of time. Here is an example from an event.

Negotiating

If you’re running a large-scale event, often times food vendors will put together a price quote and meal plan for you to review. Especially if the price quote was higher than you expected there is no problem in asking the food vendor to see where you can reduce costs as long as you do it politely. Below is an example of an appropriate question to ask to see if there is room for negotiation.

Say you’re getting charged $20 per person for dinner and that puts you over your budget. Ask the food vendor, “Is there another meal we could provide that would bring down the cost to $15? Are there changes we can make to other meals to save us money?”

Meal Ideas

Some random meal ideas. Make sure you have dietary restriction alternatives available! Especially Gluten-Free

• Thai

• Pasta

• Tacos/burritos

• Boxed Lunch/Sandwiches

• Nice pizza - not the cheap stuff

• Halal/Gyros/Falafel

• Mediterranean/Grain Bowls

• Breakfast Tacos

Depending on what type of food you are providing your attendees, there are several ways you can distribute meals efficiently and timely.

Setting up the Venue

You are going to need several tables and volunteers to set up, distribute, and clean up for each meal you provide. Try to avoid having all of your meals at one table, even at small events this will cause long wait times and may overwhelm the team serving meals.

We recommend one of the following two table set-ups for prepared and family-style meals, so you can maximize the number of people being served at one time. This will speed up the line, and make the space less crowded.

Distributing Meal Credits

If you are providing your hackers with meal credits to access your school’s dining hall, we recommend that you provide the credits upon check-in. If the credits are accessible via a physical card, you can put them in your event swag bags.

Supporting Hackers with Dietary Restrictions

We recommend that you store any meals that are specifically for folks with dietary restrictions at another table to avoid them being accidentally taken by the wrong person. We recommend printing out a list of hackers with dietary restrictions and checking off names as you hand them out, so you can ensure that the meals are being distributed to the right people.

Managing your Food Supply

If your event can only accommodate one meal per person, station a volunteer at the beginning of the food line checking off each individual as they are served. If someone gets back in line, you’ll be able to see that they’ve already been served!

This method can also be helpful for quickly identifying hackers with dietary restrictions, and redirecting them to a separate line.

Meal Announcements

If you make one big announcement that dinner is being served, it is likely that all the hackers will rush to grab food all at once and then end up in a big line. As a hacker, waiting in a 20-minute line to receive food may be frustrating.

To avoid long food lines, your team can release 1-3 tables/rooms to go get food at a time. Make a series of small announcements, and then a final call to everyone.

When it comes to prizes and swag, you should do what your budget allows. While swag is great for marketing/branding, you do not want to sacrifice quality of the other aspects of your event.

Prizes

While cash prizes are easy for events, we do not recommend them. The perceived value of a cash prize is much lower than traditional prizes.

Save the receipts for any prizes. If a winning team has 3 members instead of 4 you can return the prize to add to the next year's budget. You could also raffle the extra prizes or do social media challenges.

Many cool items will be backordered. Order prizes early to have them in time.

Prize Ideas

Gear – Cool Items To Use With Future Hacks

• Unreleased hardware

• Rechargeable battery packs

• Laptop, tablet, etc.

• Parts or Gift Cards for Inventables, Sparkfun, or Adafruit

Novelty – Things Hackers Love, But Might Not Buy For Themselves

• Retro Video Games

• Limited Edition Swag

• Personalized action figures

• Polaroid Camera

• Audible Subscription

• Geeky posters

• Office Warfare gear (ping pong ball launcher, nerf guns, etc.)

Experiences – A Memorable, One-time Adventure With Friends

• Movie Tickets

• Trip to Medieval Times or an amusement park

• A trip somewhere (may cost $1000/person, but still less overall than many cash prizes)

• Lunch with your hero

• Laser tag tournament

• Conference tickets

• Company trip – visit and hang out with your favorite companies for a day

Budget Conscious Prizes

Numbers may vary, but when collected these options were approximately these ranges.

Swag

Lanyards/Wristbands are an easy piece of swag to help make it easier to identify who has checked in and is supposed to be in your venue space. We recommend doing lanyards or wristbands at the very least. If you are making lanyards, include a space for

• Name

• Pronouns

• Role (hacker, sponsor, mentor, organizer) - Potentially get different color versions so even easier to identify

• Make sure double sided so if flips around still has name visible.

• Also include your event Discord/Slack and who to contact in case of emergency.

• A fun alternative for pronouns is to have a sponsor print pins to add to the lanyards that hackers can pick up at check-in. Check out an example from WEHack, where they had a sponsor co-design with their event theme as a special branding perk.

If you have a significant budget surplus, consider making swag bags for everyone, this can be as low cost as $5 per participant.

If you have multiple types of swag, consider distributing the swag throughout the event at different workshops/mini-events to keep hackers engaged.

If you plan to get t-shirts, remember to collect t-shirt sizes so you know the approximate % distribution you want of each size. You can also use the % below that we use here at MLH.

Some events choose to have hardware available for hackers to check out during the event. MLH also has a limited number of hardware labs we send to US based events. Talk to your Hackathon Community Manager about availability for your event.

If you want to build your own hardware lab here are some recommendations. Check out if your school has a makerspace or club that does hardware related workshops and see if they can help you, they might already have some of this they can lend you!

Setup

• Label everything. You may have volunteers who are not familiar with hardware checking items out. Label everything you can to make it easy to check in/out items

• Ideas on what to include

  • Raspberry Pis

  • Arduinos

  • Sensors (check out grove starter kits for potential ideas)

  • small screen/speaker

  • Extra wires/breadboards

  • A webcam (so they can put it on their hack and not be limited to their laptop camera)

• More expensive options

  • VR headset

  • 3D printer (leave at lab, have them bring you things to print)

Checkout Process

• Volunteer shifts. Set up shifts before the event start. Try to get your IEEE or other hardware/engineering focused club on campus involved. Make sure there is always someone there.

  • Having your Hardware lab near your general help desk will allow late night shifts to take care of both.

• Require IDs. Holding IDs until items are returned is the best way to ensure you get your items back. Have a box for these and keep it secure at all times.

• Keep a log. Keep a list of who checked what out. Only give back an ID if all is returned. This has the added benefit of seeing what hackers used so you can get more of those items next year!

You should be hoping for the best but planning for the worst. Spend some time coming up with emergency/nightmare scenarios and build up a document with contingency plans. This document should also include emergency contact numbers and other vital information. Some examples of these scenarios include:

• A fire starts in your venue.

• Too much power gets used and a fuse in the building gets tripped.

• A hacker has a medical emergency.

• Someone is caught trying to steal something expensive like networking equipment.

The list goes on, and you should have instructions on how each one should be handled. Make sure all volunteers have access to the document and having a physical copy of it on-site can be helpful.

In terms of emergency contacts, you should include campus security, the local non-emergency police number (not 911) for situations that are not time-critical, and all of your main organizers, along with the times they will be available on-site.

You should also notify local emergency services that you will be hosting a large event with a lot of students, not from your school. They should have some protocol for large events and will ideally have a person on-site or on-call through the duration of the event.

It is impossible to prepare for every possible scenario, so if something unexpected happens, remember to stay calm, try to isolate the issue, and resolve it with a level head. Make sure at least one member of your organizing team is awake and alert at all times.

First of all, assume non-malicious mistakes from hackers will happen. Some of them are beginners, some may have misunderstood your instructions, or arrived late and missed opening ceremony. Make sure to post all rules on Devpost(or your other submission platform) and that you include everything you go over in your opening ceremony.

That being said, we do see some projects submitted that cheat. This is more common for digital events. You should still check all winning projects regardless of event type for cheating.

The following list should not result in an immediate DQ, but it should prompt you to dig deeper. Talk to the team ask who worked on what part. Ask some questions on who worked on a random bit and have them explain it. Make sure you are proud of your winners an what they made!

Here are common things to check:

• You should check their GitHub(recommended you require this as part of the submissions)

  • Did they start before the event?

  • Is it one big commit at the beginning of the event? (Remember, some hackers are new! And just don't know how to use Git. One commit at the end of the event is NOT a reason to DQ)

  • Does their readme mention a different event?

  • Is every team member contributing?

• Is a solo hacker making a really advanced project in a single weekend?

• Are their Timestamps over the weekend when they run the demo in any video/screen captures?

• (If they have a video) Was the video published over the weekend?

• (If they have a video) Does it mention another event? Does it mention yours?

• Look at the team members Devpost profiles - Have they submitted this project to any other hackathons? Does it look similar to an old project in their portfolio?

This list is not exhaustive, there are other checks you can do. These are some recommended things to look out for.

Making your rules clear will help you keep your hackathon fair for all attendees, and easily be able to point to specific rules if you have to disqualify hackers for cheating.

We know that some hackathons vary though, so are including some specific rules your team should decide on.

• How many people per team?

  • Can hackers participate solo?

  • Can the teams be as large as they want, and you might just have only 4 prizes?

  • We see hackers have the most success with teams of a maximum size of 4

• Can they crosspost to other hackathons on the same weekend?

  • If there is a digital event in the same timeframe of your event can they submit to both?

  • We generally recommend no but you should very clearly state this

• Do they have to submit code?

  • Is there a specific format?

    • GitHub link, repl.it, Google drive link, etc?

• Can they use publicly available frameworks?

  • Do they need to list said frameworks in a readme?

  • What about LLM/ChatGPT/AI usage?
• Can they make multiple projects?

  • Recommend No

• Can they submit to multiple challenges?

  • Recommend Yes

• Deadline for submissions / time they can work on their projects

  • Make it very clear they cannot work on their project before the event.

• Will judging will be in person?

  • Will it be science fair style?

    • Recommended

  • Or will everyone demo to the larger group

    • Recommended only for very small events

• Who is allowed to participate

  • Students only?

  • Age Range?

  • No mentors/volunteers/organizers

• Are there any categories that require hackers to be a specific demographic?

  • Example: Beginners track where at least half the team must have this be their first hackathon.

  • Make sure to state how many of the team members must fit the category in your rules before the event.

Organizing Transportation

Regardless of the transportation you are able to help with, we recommend adding a carpool channel to your event communication platform (Discord/Slack are common). This allows hackers to connect with others who might be coming from the same area.

Travel Information Pack

• Include who they should contact for help/if they are running late

• Include different options to reach your venue. Hackers may have different budgets, and having an idea what the approximate cost/time for options will help them decide the best way to get there. Hackers from out of town will not be familiar with your local transportation, so if there is a school bus route include that information!

• Make sure to include your venue address and a parking map for any attendees who are driving. Also include if they need to print or collect a parking pass to put in their vehicle at checkin.

Travel Reimbursements

You may want to issue travel reimbursements for some or all of your attendees. A few tips:

• Email attendees via a service like SendGrid or MailChimp with instructions about how to claim their reimbursements. Include a clear timeline with receipt due dates.

• Include information in the FAQ on your website on amount and and eligibility criteria

  • Some events have different caps based on difference or carpooling.

  • For example, an event may do up to $25 of gas reimbursement if over X miles away but under X miles, but you may be eligible for up to $50 if you bring another hacker with you.

  • A hacker flying in might have a larger eligible amount, but might be limited to first X hackers who request it and they must get an approval email before the event.

• Have hackers upload receipts. All should clearly show price and date of purchase to qualify.

• Send reimbursements

• Keep all receipts for tax purposes

Charter Buses

Charter buses are typically the most affordable option for getting hackers to and from your event. Keep in mind as you plan that most buses fit 56 attendees, and the average cost per weekend is $3,300 (based on 31 hackathons in Spring 2014). Your hackathon date matters as well: for example, bus prices are often higher in April because so many schools charter them during that month for class trips.

1. Determine how many seats you’ll need

2. Reach out to student leadership at participating schools to find out how much interest there is in a bus. Have your contact create a Facebook event with the bus boarding time and ask them to invite as many people from the school that they want to.

3. Some interested students won’t show up when it’s time to board; we recommend ordering one 56-seat bus per 70 "yeses"

4. Dishing out seats on a first come, first serve often works best

2. Create a travel itinerary

• Exact locations of pick-up and drop-off points

• Contact info for a point person at the destination and arrival locations

• Trip duration and distance

3. Collect quotes

• Questions to ask

  • How much will tip, tolls, hotels, fuel, and taxes cost?

  • Can the company provide proof of insurance and US D.O.T numbers?

• Create a quote spreadsheet for each route and every company you requested info from. Include company name, price, contact info, number of buses available, etc.

MLH Tips

• Local bus companies are usually much cheaper than national ones because national companies typically sublease from local companies. (So there’s a markup)

• Adding stops to a route doesn’t cost more money

• Plan for buses to arrive 30 min before pick-up time and stay 15 mins after drop-off

• Bus companies like to send email spam. When soliciting quotes, use a bus-only email address to keep your inbox clean.

• Don’t be cheap. Watch the Transportation Webinar below to hear some stories about why it’s important to pay for quality buses

Resources

Judging has always been the biggest pain point for every hackathon organizer. This is due to the fact that while planning out the event, other than recruiting and finalizing the judges, and assigning a certain time for judging, organizing teams do not plan anything further, assuming everything can be managed on the day-of. But, in reality, if planned right, judging can be one of the easiest and the most smooth aspect of any hackathon.

Our recommendation is always towards implementing a science-fair type of judging plan.

Structurally, we recommend having hackers submit 2 minute videos on your submission platform for the judges to review. Make sure they put a lot of love and care into their submission. Their video should be a demo of their hack, not a presentation. This is not needed for judging when science fair style, but can be a reference during final deliberations, and is always a good future reference if they want to include it on their resumes.

To avoid confusion, the key is to make sure hackers know exactly where you are in the schedule for judging. Tell them you’re advancing to the next stage of judging when you do, or if judging is taking longer than expected, tell them how far along you are. Giving quick updates like “Our judges have reviewed about 50% of the projects!” goes a long way in keeping hackers engaged.

Shortlisting/elimination rounds.

We have decided not to work with hackathons with elimination rounds before projects are due, resulting in hackers having to leave the venue earlier than expected. We recommend having one pre-event shortlisting round online instead. All hackers should make it to the first judging round after submissions are due. Many events only have one judging round, though some may pick finalists to show off during closing ceremony. Keep in mind you will need ~7 minutes per team if you do this, 3-5 for the presentation and 2 minutes to set up the next group.

1. Set Up Science Fair Style Judging

In this particular judging style, assume your hackathon to be a science fair and every hacker team setting up their stall at assigned table numbers. Hackers present their hackathon project in front of the judges one by one as they arrive at their stalls, and judges score them accordingly. This way every hackathon attendee is getting a chance to demo in front of the judges and have the experience of presenting at the hackathon. Judges can also ask questions if they need clarifications on any part of the project.

For this method you need to assign table numbers. Before the event, make a map of the room with numbers so that judges can easily see where to go once assigned projects. Also at each table have a piece of paper with the project number. Make sure teams know to keep this visible. For optional added visibility, you can add the number to a stick(think kite dowel about a yard long that you can get at places like Home Depot) that makes the number visible over the top of hacker's heads.

Why not Judging Rooms?

MLH does not recommend having teams come to judges in a room. Those format types frequently have a hard time being fair because teams are only judged against the projects that happened to have the same room. Even if you have a final deliberation discussion to compare rooms, since only 1 room saw a team, ever single finalist project has to be re-pitched which relies on judge memory and notes. It is also hard to followup with team who may need to be asked questions - like asking them to share their code that they forgot to add to Devpost or to ask followup questions based on what your team finds during a cheating check.

What about Gavel/Gavel 2.0/Jury/Building your own system?

While these methods can be functional, your team needs to be very familiar with the process. Make sure the team does test runs before the event with your other organizers as fake judges. Also that your team can export the data at any point in time/has backups in case they system crashes so you do not lose all judging progress. Use last year's Devpost data to test it. Reach out to league@mlh.io if you need help getting an example export.

We recommend events use stack ranking (detailed below) as it is easier for organizers who have not handled judging before. It is also harder to break a google spreadsheet than a custom platform.

2. Timing and Assigning Judges

Time Requirement

Towards the end of the hackathon, take out some buffer time for the judging. This usually takes around 2 - 3 hours, depending on the number of submissions and judges.

Calculating the required number of Judges

A typical calculation for the number of judges looks like follows:

For eg.: Consider you have 150 projects submitted at your hackathon and you have allocated 2 hours for judging. As per our recommendation, we are having 3 rounds of judging per project and 3 minutes are allocated per project for a judge to take their decision.

Now the calculation looks like:

J= (150*3*3)/120 = 11.25 = 12

A go to table to estimate the number of judges required: