Work with information partners of the hackathon. HackDay Experience

Hello dear blog readers. In the previous article, we talked about the five-year experience of 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 the hackathon and how to work with them. Information partners will need us to attract participants and sponsors.

Attract participants

When attracting participants, you should consider several separate audiences that do not always overlap. During the PR campaign, we touch on 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, relevant VK and FB communities, within 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.

It is necessary to separate local communities / events and Russian ones. To attract participants, it is better to use urban and regional communities, communities of neighboring regions.
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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. As long as the skill is not honed, you can afford more.

A separate line will write about people who form 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 big, but different from the standard mailings with a 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 people to whom you should contact to further promote the event. So, through the chain, you can reach the most interesting local startups, as well as the heads of companies who are interested in such events. If you find contacts recently launched or preparing to launch projects, they definitely need to call and invite personally. The quality of the audience is very important, so valuable participants should be treated individually.

Universities - another great 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 have not been able to establish some meaningful cooperation and have given up trying. If you succeed in this, then tell me :) In any case, after agreeing, you will most likely be allowed to hang 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 they are ready to provide in return (the logo on the site, the opportunity to put a banner on the site).

The task of the organizers is to gather as diverse an audience as possible in the specialties so that all teams are staffed with the right specialists. At HackDay, despite our best efforts, there is always a shortage of designers.

Information channels and sponsors

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

Here we are trying to use all the media that we can reach. Since the hackathon is an event of rather small size, it is most likely that it does not make sense to go out to the state-owned media. And it makes sense to go to:

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

You need a publication about your event with the mention of the sponsor, your information partners - a news occasion.
Each information partner should prepare a proposal taking into account its specificity, the subject of news. 1-3 events are enough for one event. No more hackathons. In addition, such channels give a good plus to the image of the event, especially if it is not a 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 the motivation of the audience and the standard techniques that are used on HackDay during the period of attracting participants.