The know-how we have built over the years enabled us to design a productive process and an efficient platform that guarantees a successful competition.
The Chief Growth Officer at Untap. Maggie's full-time job is to help people find solutions they need to make bigger impact. A firm believer in sharing knowledge and telling stories as a way for growth on individual and organizational levels.
The know-how we have built over the years enabled us to design a productive process and an efficient platform that guarantees a successful competition.
The first step in planning a hackathon is defining your objective. This will set the tone for everything that comes after, such as defining the theme, tracks, eligibility, … etc.
One way of measuring your competition success is by the number and quality of the submissions you receive. However, many competition organizers get lost in the operations, that they forget the outreach and communication part.
As the leading initiative in MENA for learning programming languages in Arabic, the One Million Arab Coders initiative – a Dubai Future Foundation project – needed to use their vast network of coders to act in a very short time frame and come up with tech-based solutions for the Arab world to lessen the challenges caused by COVID-19.
Planning a hackathon has its own specifics, from coming up with the concept, through managing applications, to selecting winners. Keeping a checklist is the simple yet most effective way to close all the gaps in organizing such an event.
One of the reasons why applicants churn from certain programs is the ambiguity related to the application process. Never hearing back from a program can be disappointing, especially if the applicant spent a long time filling in their application form.
Organizing an awards program can be a lot of work, many tasks to manage at the same time, and several stakeholders to communicate with, we feel you! However, if your aim is to increase the quantity and quality of applications received, you will need to add some more tasks to the list!
The judges experience needs to be straightforward and intuitive. As mentioned, judges usually are busy people, and they don’t expect to spend more time than they should reviewing or trying to reach applications.
If you ever managed any kind of a call for applications, you probably know that it goes far beyond building forms and receiving applications. There are a lot more to do than the core tasks of building the program landing page, assigning judges to submissions, communicating with applicants, etc.