Developer Relations — Hackathon (college) mentorship & sponsorships best practices
In my past job at Oracle as a Developer Advocate, I was lucky to have been involved for a few years with mentoring & teaching students from d.tech high school to universities like Stanford (Tree Hacks) and Carnegie Mellon(Tartan Hacks) where we led workshops, judged hackathon projects, awarded prizes to students who impressed us with not only their technical abilities but also out of the box thinking and attitude.
From Oracle’s perspective hackathon sponsorship resulted in multiple wins for the organization —increased brand awareness for recruitment and developer evangelism, increased cloud (free trial) usage and a great way for us to gather first hand feedback from student developers. We got a pulse of what the new generation cares about from programming languages, frameworks, technologies to ideas that reflects a greater trend among the student developers at large.
Here are some practical lessons that you may find helpful when thinking about sponsoring/supporting a (3rd party) hackathon:
- Leadership Buy-In : Generally first step in getting your organizations is to sponsor is to have leadership support, ideally someone who understand how important student demographics is to the business. At Oracle we were supported by a fantastic leader who has been long time higher education evangelist — Jenny-Tsai Smith. Jenny not only encouraged us to participate at hackathons but also sponsored prizes and provided special offer (#3) to students.
- Forge Partnerships : There are multiple ways to partner with hackathon organizers, most common is as a direct sponsor (at multiple levels) where you are you are either given a table or booth, along with company promotion in marketing materials and possibly a session such as hands on lab. Make sure you are prepared, if you are going to show up and have a booth, it is a good ideas to carry fun give away swag & show case demos running on a machine and most importantly offer hands on help to the participants. Another other option to sponsor is via MLH (Major League Hacking) who has partnered with several colleges across North America and Europe and they help them run amazing hackathons.
- Gather your Team & Assign Duties : Having a team of people who can not only provided the needed help but also complement each other’s skillet divide the work-load throughout the event. At Oracle we had anywhere from 3 to 6 people rotating in as per schedule that way we made sure at least one person was there to support the students. It helps to plan beforehand the time-schedules, dry run logistics (#4) and be familiar with common technologies and obstacle that students may run into. Generally hackathon organizers also have their own systems such as slack/discord where they create a channel for students to get in touch with the sponsors so make sure everyone on the team is there.
4. Prize & Judging Criteria: Having an attractive prize & clear criteria for the winners team is always a great idea as most students will be looking at that and deciding whether to build using your products & services or not. For prizes we provided things like Apple Gadgets to thousands of dollars worth cloud credits or a mix of the two that attracted lot of student projects. You can look at past hackathons and see what the prizes were to get a better idea.
5. On-boarding and Live Support : The first thing student or for that matter anyone using your product/service would need is a helpful guide or tutorial to get started with. This can come as an live hands on lab session or a webpage (ideally created for this event) or even a YouTube video that greets the users and shows them step by step assuming to get to first win. It is worth while for the team to have gone through this process themselves and make sure it’s simple, quick and has a payoff to get students excited. For Oracle Cloud, we provided links to getting started guides for various services, shared links to interesting GitHub projects that not only guided students but also gave them ideas and inspiration on how they may use our service to make innovative applications. Lastly it goes without saying that there will be hiccups and people will need hands on support so make sure they know where to find you and you are ready from a sense of caring to help them.
6. Judging and Celebrate the win : Lastly this the moment that everyone is waiting for, time to find the winners and award prizes. For us, we met up few hours before the judging began to create a simple rubric based on our criteria and rating from 1–10. Everyone individually judged the projects — hear students pitch, ask them clarifying questions (specially if they used Oracle Cloud or not as lot of claim for your prize but may not have used your service), look at their code if on GitHub and give them a rating. After every qualified project is judged, it’s time to tally up the rating and find the winner(s) and pass that information to the organizer. At the final ceremony you can either provide the prize right then and there(ideal) or take their information to provide it later, make sure to take a picture and capture this moment!
7. Follow up & Support : A successful hackathon engagement doesn’t just end with the hackathon. It’s always a good idea to keep in touch with all the students who used your product/service and you can do that by giving them your contact information or having a inviting them to a follow up session and providing any help. I organized did a follow up Zoom session with the winning teams in order to make sure they got the prizes, but are also familiar with how to use other interesting Oracle Cloud services and provide support for their continued work on the hackathon project or in other ways such as with getting internship/job or getting funded to do higher ed research from our company.
8. Metrics : No job is ever complete without showing results or KPI’s for your effort so make sure you document common event related metrics like number of participants who attended, competitors and their offerings, students who used your services, those who were winners — their projects, names and affiliation etc. You can also get these from hackathon organizers. It’s nice to share the outcome in a blog post or social media post afterwards.
Finally, remember that in a hackathon, you get what you invest, often is a major undertaking not only by the student hackers but also by organizers (generally are volunteers) and sponsors so prepare well to have successful hackathon engagement. I’d love to hear your thoughts, comments and questions below.
