What’s new in Devpost for Teams: New voting, guest access, and setup features

Maximize your Devpost for Teams (DFT) experience with these powerful new features! In this quarter's update, we've launched flexible new voting tools, streamlined guest management, and enhanced hackathon setup capabilities to simplify running your hackathons.

Let’s get right into it.

Powerful new voting features

Enabling voting allows you to bring more voices into the project evaluation process—increasing the total number of people participating and overall impact of your hackathon.

These improvements to our voting system make it easy for you to increase participation and flexibility in how you conduct voting on DFT:

Public Voting

Expand your reach with Public Voting. Now you can create public voting links that anyone can access without a DFT account, perfect for boosting participation and including a broader audience.

For example, you can use Public Voting to conduct a “Popular Choice” vote by sharing the voting links on company-wide channels. This gives people who couldn’t build a project in your hackathon the chance to participate through voting.

Now, when you’re creating a new voting group, you have three voting permission settings to choose from:

• Public: Anyone with the voting link can access the voting ballot and cast votes, no sign-in or account required
• Email only required: Users must enter their email address to vote, but won’t need to sign into DFT or create an account
• Sign-in required: Voters must sign into their DFT account to vote

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Combined Voting

Simplify voting with Combined Voting. Create and share a single link with all voters, eliminating the hassle of multiple links and making the process easier for both organizers and participants.

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Custom Project Ordering on Voting Ballots

Take control of your voting ballots with Custom Project Ordering. Arrange projects on voting ballots in any order you want—whether it’s to match the order projects were presented or to create a custom lineup that works best for your hackathon.

When you’re creating a new voting group, you have the option to select how projects will be ordered on the voting ballot:

• Alphabetical (A-Z)
• Alphabetical (Z-A)
• Custom
• Randomized

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Guest management features

You can effortlessly collaborate with external partners in your hackathons by using guest management features. This allows you to easily and securely collaborate with customers, partners, and other external guests in your DFT environment.

Check out this help article for a step-by-step breakdown of how to use guest hackathon features.

How guest hackathons work:

1. Invite external participants via email through DFT or by sending them your invitation link.
2. Email invites are auto-approved, whereas guests invited by link have to submit their name and email address for your approval.
3. Guests can only access the hackathons they’ve been invited to—keeping your data secure.
4. Bonus: Guests can also serve as hackathon judges. After they’ve registered for the hackathon, organizers can add guests to the list of judges. 

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Not sure whether to invite guests to your hackathons? Consider these use cases for how you can benefit from allowing customers and partners to participate:

• Improve AI product adoption: Run guest hackathons and give your customers the chance to experiment with and learn your AI tools. SAP does this with its customer hackathons—here’s how.
• Product testing: Let customers try upcoming products and gather their feedback in a collaborative environment.
• Build partnerships: Work with potential partners to tackle shared challenges and explore ways to collaborate.

Hackathon setup enhancements

And finally, these feature updates help make managing your hackathon pages simpler and more flexible:

• Hackathon pages and projects now support Loom videos, giving you the option to embed YouTube, Vimeo, or Loom videos.
• Registration and submission questions can now be set up with a linear scale answer format. This makes it easier for you to aggregate data while ensuring it’s quick and easy for participants to answer. For example, you can ask participants a question like, “On a scale of 1-5, how proficient are you with Python?” and then compare answers from when they registered to their answers at final submission.
• New submission questions allow you to collect information from participants before the submission deadline. This ensures that judges and organizers have the relevant context to evaluate submissions and proceed with the post-submission phase of the hackathon. To set this up, just edit the project template and click “Add submission questions” at the bottom of the hackathon page to get started.

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See these features in action

We’d love to show you how to get the most out of these features for your unique hackathon needs. Book a demo with our team to see these features in action and to get tips for how to use them to improve your private hackathons.