Should your company host a Hackathon?

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

I’m certain your company has asked themselves this question more than once without really knowing why. Without really understanding the types of Hackathons or the value for the company. Hackathons are a huge commitment to facilitate effectively but can pay off if your company can have honest and vulnerable conversations about aims, objectives, and expectations. Here are 5 things your company should think about before hosting a Hackathon.

1. What do we want to achieve?
   This is one of the most important questions your company has to ask especially since success is defined in quantifiable terms for many public and private organizations. Some companies use Hackathons to help marketing efforts, while others use Hackathons as a recruitment tool and some use it to incubate ideas to bring into their internal pipeline. Regardless of the specific objective, your company has to have one.
2. Who will fund the event?
   The department(s) that fund the event have a huge influence on the decision-making and often influence the event to focus on their individual objectives. If there is a collaboration between departments and even partners there must be transparency and value alignment or the event can become a failure very quickly.
3. How will we engage participants?
   Different demographics of participants will be enticed by different offerings. Sometimes access to world-class mentors is attractive, while other times huge cash prizes. The pull is specific to the community. It’s important to note, corporate hackathons typically fail at nurturing a great community designed for collaboration and attempt to activate a community only when they need them. In my opinion, this is why many corporate Hackathons struggle to achieve the diversity that makes Hackathons great but that’s a conversation for another day.
4. How do we manage expectations?
   This is extremely important. Not every Hackathon has to be with the goal to bring people together to build a million-pound company, however many use that narrative as a way to attract participants without allocating resources to help them and it’s dishonest. Managing expectations about the mission of the hackathon, what participants can expect during and post hackathon, and who owns the intellectual property are all extremely important.
5. How do we host a hackathon?
   This sounds really obvious but there are so many ways to host a hackathon such as virtual, in-person, or hybrid, focusing on particular themes or allowing participants to have creative flexibility, how long the event should occur, and more. All these decisions influence whether your company will achieve its goal in hosting the Hackathon and whether the participants will enjoy the event enough to be begging for the next one soon.

These are just a few questions to ask to start a productive conversation about whether your organization should host a Hackathon. There are many many more. If your curious about how a Hackathon can help your organization feel free to message me on Twitter and we can talk every Hackathons.