Work with hackathon information partners. Hackday experience

Hello dear blog readers. In the previous article, we talked about the five-year experience of conducting hackathons, about the main points and mistakes. Now we begin to disassemble the hackathon by bone.
Today I will tell you how to find information partners for a hackathon and how to work with them. We need information partners to attract participants and sponsors.

We attract participants

When attracting participants, several individual audiences that do not always overlap should be considered. During the PR campaign, we touch upon several specialties: programmers (who in turn are divided by technology), designers, entrepreneurs, project managers, interface designers, and marketers.

Potential participants can be found in specialized forums, the relevant VK and FB communities, inside business incubators and in their newsletters, in public organizations. You also need to make friends with specialized events, their distribution is another channel for attracting participants.

Local communities / events and Russian should be separated. To attract participants it is better to use urban and regional communities, communities of neighboring regions.

For newsletters and announcements, you need to write short texts with key points: what kind of event, whom you invite, why you need to participate, who are the speakers. Our announcements, for example, 350 characters. Until mastery is perfected, you can afford more.

I’ll write a separate line about people who shape public opinion. Usually they have a certain audience in the form of VK and FB subscribers, which will pay attention to the mention of your event by a respected person. These people need to write individual thoughtful letters, not too large, but different from the standard mailing lists with the request to support the event.

In addition to the request to announce you through the community channels and in your personal account, you should definitely ask if there are any people who should be contacted to further advance the event. So, along the chain, you can reach the most interesting local startups, as well as company executives who are interested in such events. If you find contacts of recently launched or preparing to launch projects, they must definitely call and invite in person. The quality of the audience is very important, therefore, valuable participants should be approached individually.

Universities are another excellent habitat for potential participants. In theory, they have the opportunity to inform students about the event, and in theory they are interested in growing business projects within their walls. I think that it is, but for five years we could not establish any meaningful cooperation and abandoned the attempts. If this works out for you, then tell me :) In any case, after coordination, you will probably be allowed to hang up posters. You can also make personal invitations to teachers.

For all information partners you need to make a clear proposal: what do you want from them (how many mailings, how many announcements, etc.) and what you are ready to provide in return (logo on the site, the ability to put a banner on the site).

The task of the organizers is to collect the audience as diverse as possible in the field of specialties, so that all teams are staffed with the right specialists. Despite all our efforts, there is always a lack of designers at HackDay.

Information channels and sponsors

As a rule, the standard package for sponsors provides for mention in press releases. A standard press release is written in the following sequence: what kind of event - who are the participants - what is the expected result - who are the speakers - what is the significance for the city / region \ country \ society \ business - date, place, time. Somewhere in the mass of information is the mention of sponsors.

Here we try to use all the media that we can reach. Since the hackathon is an event rather of a small size, it most likely makes no sense to go out to the state-owned media. And it makes sense to go to:

• news agencies;
• local news sites;
• Sites of state bodies and public organizations.

You need a publication about your event with a mention of the sponsor, your news partners - a news occasion.
Each information partner needs to prepare a proposal taking into account its specifics, topics of news. For one event, 1-3 prominent regional media are enough. Hackathon doesn’t need more. In addition, such channels give a good plus to the image of the event, especially if it is not one-time.

This instruction can be applied to hackathons of any size, any subject and audience - the essence will remain the same.

In the next article I will talk about audience motivation and standard techniques that are used on HackDay during the period of attracting participants.