Hackathon planning
What is a hackathon?
Master these hackathon fundamentals to help you get ready to plan a successful event.
Read more
Learn about the DFT features that help internal hackathon organizers save time, increase participation, and showcase results.
If you’re thinking of running an internal hackathon, the platform you choose to run it on will have a big impact on the success of your event. Devpost for Teams (DFT) is a purpose-built platform made to help internal hackathon organizers run better events.
In this post, we’ll highlight the DFT features that will help you save time, increase participation, and showcase the results of your hackathons.
DFT is an intuitive platform that saves you time by bringing all the information and functionality related to running a hackathon into one place.
The hackathon landing page is the central hub with all the key information about your event. This is where participants and judges will first land when they come to learn more about your hackathon. Here you’ll find all the key details and resources that someone would need to take part in the hackathon.
This is where you can outline the submission requirements, judging criteria, and schedule with key dates.
Here are some of the details you can find on the landing page:
As an organizer, you need people to find your hackathon. Your event will have its own unique URL so it can be shared with your colleagues through your organization’s communications channels.
Setting up a new hackathon on DFT is easy thanks to a collection of 11 pre-built templates. These templates do the bulk of the work required to set up a new event and come loaded with the information needed to run each type of event.
The templates mean you can set up these types of hackathons with just a few clicks:
Once you select a template, you can customize it as much (or as little!) as you need. Alternatively, you can create your own custom template to use again and again.
Related: Learn about 8 types of internal hackathons to drive innovation within your organization
The judging process is how winners are ultimately determined. But if you’ve ever managed a hackathon without using a dedicated hackathon platform, you’ll know that it can very quickly take more time and effort than anticipated. This is another huge time-saving feature of DFT.
The judging features include inviting judges, setting the judging criteria, a simple UI for scoring and commenting, and the ability to track judges’ scores within the platform.
On the hackathon page, administrators can invite judges for that event. To add judges:
From the hackathon page, you can also edit the judging criteria.
After the submission deadline passes, judges will be able to see all of the projects and judging criteria. They’re able to give scores for each of the criteria and enter feedback. During the judging period, hackathon managers can keep track of results in a leaderboard that is only visible to them.
Related: See how Finastra streamlined judging in its internal hackathons with DFT
Throughout the event, you’ll likely want to send updates to participants and judges. The hackathon announcements feature makes it easy to compose and send messages. To do this:
A big part of getting more people to participate in hackathons comes down to making it easy for them to do so. There are a few ways DFT helps with this—easy-to-use project prompts, built-in teambuilding features, and the option to run private guest hackathons.
DFT reduces the amount of work it takes participants to set up a new project, meaning they can spend more time on building. Here’s a quick overview of how easy it is for participants to create a new project.
On the hackathon page, participants can click to register for the hackathon at the top of the page. Then they’ll have two options:
After clicking “create project,” it will immediately open a screen where participants can enter details about the project including their region and select the project theme (based on what was set by the event organizer).
In the description section, there are questions that participants can answer to help fill in the project details. This includes:
That’s pretty much it! In just a few clicks they’ll have the framework set up for their projects and can move on to building.
Teambuilding is built into DFT to help participants find other people to work with. DFT makes it easy for participants to share their ideas, find teams to join, find ideas they’re passionate about, and find teams with the right tech skills to partner with. Here’s how.
At the bottom of the hackathon page, you’ll see all the projects and people listed as participating in that hackathon. You can go through and see an overview of their project, and then click in to see their idea, who’s on the team, and any other team members they’re looking for, which includes any specific skill sets.
Participants can directly invite specific people to join their project by sending them an invitation through the platform.
They can also put out a call to have others join their project by indicating what kinds of teammates they’re looking for. This is done by:
Projects can also be marked as allowing anyone to join.
For participants who want to join a project, all they need to do is click on an open project that matches their skill set and then click “join.” Any other team members on the project will get a notification that someone has just joined their project.
Users on our Pro tier can easily get onto DFT using single sign-on (SSO). This eliminates the need for them to do any kind of registration to get into DFT. Users will just need to enter in their work email address and then will see the option to join your organization’s DFT environment.
Many companies (like SAP), run private guest hackathons on Devpost for Teams. These events allow you to collaborate with partners, other organizations, and select customers.
As an event organizer, it’s easy to invite select participants from outside your organization. You can add external guests to your event directly from the hackathon page. You can add up to 200 email addresses at a time to invite them to join.
Your hackathon’s impact can last for a long time after the event has ended. It all comes down to how you’re able to showcase results across your organization and inspire future hackathons.
After a hackathon is over, users can still browse through the hackathon site. Winning projects are displayed at the top of the page, which can all be clicked on and viewed in more detail. All of the details from the event, including any details and resources, are still shown on the hackathon page to act as a reference.
At the bottom of the hackathon page, you can view the full list of all projects that were created. Each project has a unique URL, which makes it easy to share with others in your organization and maximize the potential impact of each project.
You can also search and filter through the projects. For example, you can filter by theme if you’re looking to deep dive into a certain topic.
Having a catalog of projects readily available increases visibility into the hackathon’s outcomes.
DFT’s reporting features make it easy to access the data from your hackathon. You can download the following data into CSV files:
DFT also lets you add custom registration questions for participants, which will be available in your reporting.
Using a hackathon platform is the first step to running better hackathons. Not only will using Devpost for Teams significantly streamline your event, but you’ll also be backed by our team of hackathon planning experts to help make your next hackathon your best one yet. Book a demo to get started.
