Build your online hackathon website and registration form.

Online Hackathon Website

In order to know how to start a Hackathon first a good, clear, and engaging website is crucial. Take a look at the one we designed.

It contains all the main sections. Consider it while designing your online hackathon website.

Hackathon registration form

When organizing an online hackathon, it’s important to get contact details but it’s also crucial to try to understand if registrants are serious about the hackathon. Therefore, we asked them to provide the following:

• Perceived Effectiveness. That is, how effectively the idea/solution addresses issues related to one of the four challenge categories (If the hackathon has categories)
• Technical Feasibility. I.e., how technically feasible would the solution be to create and produce.
• Uniqueness. In brief, how unique the idea/solution is? Moreover, how can it help promote the usage of your technologies, software, and/or products?
• Business Potential. For instance, how much short and long-term revenue potential would the idea represent? Also, how easy the proposed business model would be to implement?

At last, you can use these online tools to organize a Hackathon:

• Typeform: a “made for humans” form software that can help you get more thoughtful responses, and higher completion rates.
• WordPress plugins such as Contact Form 7 or WPforms: tools made to help you keep track of the registrations and your Hackathon process flow in a simple way and, at the same time, you don’t need to know much about databases.

Apply a human-centered design thinking approach

Whenever possible, consider using a design thinking approach when creating your virtual hackathon intellectual structure. With this largely used approach, designers’ work processes help us systematically extract, teach, learn and apply human-centered techniques to solve problems in a creative and innovative way – in our designs, in our businesses, in our countries, in our lives.

These are the design thinking steps:

• Empathise – with your users
• Define – your users’ needs, their problems, and your insights
• Ideate – by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions
• Prototype – to start creating solutions
• Test – solutions

We at Kreativdistrikt, widely use this effective technique to conduct our virtual hackathons.

Select the best ideas and announce the online Hackathon teams

Once the selected 10 out of 65 registrants were chosen, we called them directly. This was done to make sure they had the intent to effectively participate. Certainly, this is crucial to find committed teams that won’t give up early in the competition.

Consequently, we announced the selected ideas on our website. The outcomes were also communicated via tailored emails to each participant.

Milestones, technical support and project submission

Undeniably, you want to keep track of project progress. Another key point is monitoring participants’ commitment. To this end, we set the following 3 milestones. As can be seen in these Hackathon steps, these items should be delivered before the Project Submission:

#1 – Essay: this document explains the idea behind the team’s proposed solution. Nonetheless, it should also describe the methods and laying outflows and features.

#2 – Mockup Demo: It’s a basic visual prototype. However, it also gives a look and feel of the future solution. This is useful to test the core concepts and clear the loose ends.

#3 – Final video: That is when participants showcase the different structures of the solution they designed.

 #4 – Project Submission: Make clear from the beginning how you want the project delivered. In particular, language required, deliver a ZIP file, a link to Apple App Store / Google Play Store. If you don’t plan to use an online hackathon platform, then, Google forms is a great way to have the submission documentation all in one place.

Winners announcement

And the winner is…

Spread the word in many ways:

• Online hackathon website update.
• Posts on social media.
• Online blog articles.

For instance, one can provide teams’ company and project links. Also, honorable mentions, prize pool, and information about future events should be included.