Are Hackathons Overrated? Part 2
I organized a hackathon called the Mile High Hack in Denver.
It took place over 3 days in April 2023.
50 volunteers signed up.
I received over $1000 dollars in donations local businesses and individuals.
Focused Labs sponsored the event by paying for the event space.
4 local non-profits participated:
Hope House Colorado, empowering and supports teen moms
COLOR Latina, advocating for Latina opportunity and reproductive rights
The Fax Denver, fighting gentrification and promoting affordable housing on East Colfax
Colorado School of Public Health, supporting their food safety center of excellence
Here’s how I did it -
The Organization
I wanted my hackathon to follow the same model as Ruby for Good. Projects would be driven by actual stakeholders from the community, not the hackers. From my hackathon experience, this had the highest success rate of the code getting used. This meant that getting stakeholders onboard was a prerequisite.
I began with cold outreach to non-profits in Denver in Fall of 2022. I emailed those I had heard about and went down the list from Colorado Gives Day. It was slow. Many non-profits didn’t respond to me. And those who agreed to meet with me had no idea what a hackathon entailed or had the staff resources to figure out how a technical solution could help them. Basically, lots of introductory Zoom calls with no follow-ups.
Then in January 2023, some productive Capricorn energy must have been in the air and non-profits who I had previously planted seeds with reached back out to me. I was excited. I had four non-profits who were committed to participating in a hackathon and had one or two ideas of what they wanted built.
And just like that, the thrill of organizing was injected into me. Unlike what I experienced in my day job, there was no boss or slashed budget or workplace politics bullshit to slow me down. There was nobody I had to prove myself to, because all of this was my own initiative. I had complete control and that was really fun.
My next steps could be broken down as follows: marketing, funding, budgeting, recruiting, and project scoping.
Marketing
Not my strong suit. Thankfully, I could rely on my support system for this: mainly my husband. He quickly pointed out that my website milehighhack.club might not attract my target audience. Good call. I changed the domain to milehighhack.org instead.
He also designed a flyer using eye-catching Denver Nuggets colors and edited out my tendency for wordiness. The tagline was “Designer? Product Manager? Software Engineer? Do Something Good.”
A good decision I made was not to spend precious time building a website from scratch. Instead, I bought a Squarespace subscription and cheap clip art from Etsy artists and spun up a site in a couple hours. I set my recruiting goal to only 10 volunteers. I thought that setting my expectations low would avoid severe disappointment later.
Posters: still a highly effective recruiting mechanism. Apply generously at coffee shops.
Funding
After emailing some co-working spaces, the lowest quote I got was $2,000 dollars for a weekend rental. I realized that the biggest cost of hosting a hackathon was event space. I would have to charge at least $80 dollars per volunteer to cover it.
I assumed that $80 dollars might be steep for some volunteers, especially students.
I started asking for donations. I emailed everyone from my former startup CEOs to my classmates. I refrained from asking family because I wanted to see what my professional network was capable of. Answer: If you don’t burn your bridges, cultivate your network, and pay it forward, your professional network will be incredibly supportive! I am so grateful to Chris Norris of Bicycle Health, Ralph Crawford-Marks of Bonusly, Jeff Casimir of the Turing School, and Michelle Davey of Wheel Health for their generous donations to the hackathon.
One day, a got a fantastic email - the CEO of Focused Labs, who I met through a mutual friend, wanted to cover the entire cost of the event space at Venture X. This was an extremely polished and professional co-working space conveniently located in the heart of downtown Denver.
After that email I lowered the registration cost to $30 dollars. I probably could have made the event free but then it would make it easier for people to sign-up and flake. As I soon learned, thirty bucks turned out to be a great price for attracting many volunteers.
Budgeting
To give you an idea of how much I paid to run a successful hackathon, see my budget:
$1,350 for 2 catered lunches, coffee, and way to many snacks (we donated the leftovers to nurses)
$500 for speakers and a professional comedian
$300 for registration website and advertising costs
$50 for hosting and a ChatGPT subscription
TOTAL: $2,200. Not including the cost of event space, which was donated.
Recruiting
I posted my hackathon flyer on my social media accounts, emailed it to my current and former coworkers and managers, and posted in local Slack groups (e.g. Code for America chapters, DenverUX, Ruby for Good, among others). I biked around Denver and hung it up at coffee shops and coworking spaces. My husband posted it in the Denver Reddit group and got 80 upvotes and even more views.
I thought I would struggle to get volunteers. WRONG. I ended up closing the registration after I received over 50 signups and worried I would not have enough project work for all the volunteers.
I also thought the majority of volunteers would be students or people looking for jobs due to recent tech layoffs. Wrong again! The demographics broke down like this:
As I spread the word, I quickly discovered the addictive nature of organizing. While I initially thought my hackathon idea was compelling, I wasn't sure if others would share my enthusiasm. However, during my recruitment efforts I was pleasantly surprised by the level of interest from others. One standout was Christina, a college senior eager to contribute. Her resourcefulness and proactive approach not only secured us discounts on pizza but also convinced one of the Denver mayoral runoff candidates to speak at the hackathon. It’s crazy how someone can amplify your own passion for something just by sharing in it themselves.
Scoping
This is the hardest part about hackathon organizing, or for that matter any software development project. I remembered this from my Ruby for for Good experience as a project lead. I did not want to feel like I failed again, so I decided to take on the majority of the scoping myself.
I estimated 15 hours of scoping work per project. So 90 hours over the course of three months, on top of my day job. It was a lot of work. I quit my teaching side hustle so I could dedicate evenings to hackathon planning.
The work involved zoom meetings with the stakeholder to figure out what they wanted and how it would help their organization or processes. I wrote a one-pager detailing the deliverables for each project and created a project management board using Notion to break down each deliverable into small, technical tickets.
Scoping software development projects for a hackathon is hard for several reasons:
Time: You only have a weekend to build and deliver something. How do you create an MVP - minimum viable product - in 3 days or less?
Maintainability: When the hackathon ends, who maintains the project and fixes bugs? If you are hosting an application, how do you empower the stakeholder to get alerted if something is broken or manage the deployment service?
Buy vs Build: These days, there’s a SaaS application for everything. Would it be better for the non-profit to just use their precious time and money to buy and software solution?
Lower technical knowledge in the non-profit industry: It’s no surprise that many non-profits lack the technical expertise among in-house staff. Much of this is outsourced to contractors, like CRM software or website designers. How do you know if the stakeholder is requesting a technical solution that is actually going to provide value?
To demonstrate the last two points, one of our stakeholders was using a peer-to-peer texting app called Impactive that was costing them $500 dollars a year. They wanted us to build a free version. Look, $500 dollars is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of a custom-built application. But I wanted to let them drive the project. In retrospect, I should have convinced them to explore other types of projects.
The day before the hackathon kick-off, I was nervous. Yes, I had an exciting suite of projects, more than enough volunteers, and the Chipotle order was in. But would people show up? Would they be cool? Was single-handedly taking on the product management for four projects a huge mistake? And how hard was it going to be to coordinate a group of volunteers with vastly different technical capabilities who just met each other to build something that worked in less than 3 days?
