Motivation of the audience. How to attract participants to the hackathon. HackDay Experience

In the two previous articles, we talked about how to work with information partners and about our experience in organizing HackDay as a whole.
Today we will talk about such an important thing as the motivation of the participants.

A few years ago, when we started doing a series of hackathons, the market was not spoiled by a large number of events, and it was not worth the hard work to lure an active part of the audience to it, for the simple reason that there was no place to go. On the other hand, there was a problem in a large reservoir of less active people who did not attend events in principle. They did not understand the benefits they bring. It turned out that about 80% of the audience roamed from one event to another without producing any usefulness except for the visibility of a party.

However, even inside the active participants there were always several groups to which we addressed through different channels and motivating from different ways. Along with the growing market, the audience has matured. We managed to reach out and explain the usefulness of visiting HackDay to a deaf audience. We received very high-quality participants (as we call them within the team) who are able to generate distinct ideas and bring to life not only at the event, but later.
If we classify the motivation of the participants, then we can say that it is professional and personal. Each participant who comes to the event is motivated both way.

Promises of professional motivation
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Our main participants are programmers (different technologies), designers, project authors. For each group, we make our small announcements in specialized communities.
Programmers are usually interested in applying their knowledge in the context of rapid development and launch. They are interested in the experience of finding such a solution that allows you to make a project from an idea to a working prototype. A separate line are programmers who own rarely used technology and who are interested in applying it on a working project.
The inner world of designers is not entirely clear to us and, as I wrote in the previous article, they are always not enough on HackDay, but in general we use the same words and hooks to attract them as for programmers with a difference in the style of circulation.
Project authors usually urgently need a team or some of its missing members, whom they find on hackathons and with whom they go to a bright future. Also, the project authors need to communicate with the speakers and mentors of the event and receive clear feedback on business, technology, marketing.
And all together, these groups are interested in learning new technologies (programming, UX \ UI, marketing, etc.) in the educational program, which can be applied here and now, during working weekends.

Promotions of personal motivation

Promotions of personal motivation is a hodgepodge that helps potential participants break away from the familiar environment and come to the hackathon. Perhaps this is less specific, but more effective motivation, the root cause of participation. It is necessary to write extremely simple and understandable things.
What theses we usually use:
- come and do something new and interesting. Works for programmers and designers. Both those and others can be authors of projects;
- to do for the weekend a project for which there was no time;
- spend time with the benefits of professional circles. Difficult to submit a proposal to hang out;
- get a large number of contacts;
- get feedback from other participants.
All these abstracts are used together for 2-3 for different groups and for different announcements, depending on the resource through which they reach the audience, from the time remaining to the event.

For announcements and articles you need to use a friendly, unmarked tone, in simple language to tell why people need to participate in the event. Hackathon is the most informal format possible. And informality is a huge plus for shy authors, complex designers and introvert programmers.

In the next article I will talk about the organization of the educational program: which topics to choose, how to combine the topics and dates so as to extract the maximum benefit from the education.