Online hackathons create engagement and help gain a competitive edge

An online hackathon is a digital event that brings together people, especially from a tech background with similar interests, to innovate, brainstorm, and solve various predefined challenges within a specified time frame. The aim of an online hackathon is often to create a working solution or prototype of a product or service.

Here is a step-by-step guide to run a virtual hackathon:

• 1. Conceptualize the event concerning the themes, objectives, challenges and stages.
• 2. Configure an online platform that allows all event-related execution on a single dashboard.
• 3. Market the event through social media outreach and email campaigns. Invite participants to create teams, strategize and collaborate.
• 4. Review submission on different parameters and, based on it, automatically calculate results.
• 5. Create a live leadership board for transparency.
• 6. Undertake a post-event analytics to host an even better hackathon next time.

The benefits of hackathons are:

• Crowdsource ideas-

• Hackathons serve as a playground for new people and technologies to step in and innovate.

• Create a strong employer brand-

• Emerge as the voice of innovation and change with strong brand recall.

• Hire the best talent-

• Shorten the recruitment process from a couple of weeks to a few days.

• Engage with your employees

• by fostering cross-team collaboration, inclusivity and internal innovation.

• Accelerate the product roadmap

• by accessing multiple working prototypes in a short period.

A successful hackathon commences with ideation and ends with execution. Once you have clarity about your hackathons objective, you can ideate themes, challenges, stages, participants, judges, and every other requirement. Choose a hackathon platform that manages your hackathons execution hassles such as setting up a personalized and interactive landing page, seamless participant and judge experience, marketing support, easy review of submissions and post-event analytics.

A virtual hackathon is a digital event that brings together people, especially from the tech background with similar interests, to innovate, brainstorm and solve predefined challenges within a specified time frame. A virtual hackathon usually aims to create a working solution or prototype of a product or service. A common understanding of hackathon participants is limited to coders and analysts. Yet a more unorthodox approach can bring together quantitative and qualitative minds, opening your virtual hackathons/ideathons to problem-solvers in general.

Online hackathons are the easiest to organize. All you need is to partner with an online hackathon platform, providing a single dashboard with features to set up an event landing page, offering instructions about challenges and stages. The platform must market your event to invite your target participants, enable participants to create teams and collaborate. It must allow the judges to easily review participant submissions and announce winners. The right online hackathon platform with the requisite features is half the battle won in organizing your event.

Here is a step-by-step plan to conduct a successful and efficient hackathon:

• 1. Conceptualize the event on themes, objectives, challenges, and stages.
• 2. Configure an online platform that allows all event-related execution on a single dashboard.
• 3. Market the event through social media outreach and email campaigns. Invite the participants to create teams, strategize and collaborate.
• 4. Review the submissions on different parameters and, based on them, automatically calculate results.
• 5. Create a live leadership board for transparency and undertake a post-event analytics to host an even better hackathon next time.

Hackathons are a new trend in tech communities. A hackathon program is a great way to make inroads into the tech community, build a brand name and recruit. Based on the ideas of innovation, problem-solving and prototyping, a hackathon program creates a business simulation to empower participants to innovate, brainstorm, and solve various predefined challenges within a specified time frame. A hackathon program aims to create a working solution or prototype of a product or service.