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.
Running a hackathon is a valuable event for your organization, it is your way to attract the brightest talent, develop innovative prototypes, and boost your brand among developers community. However, planning and organizing a hackathon is not the easiest task.
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.
The multi-round funnel allows you to break down the applications and judging process into phases, each with a set of requirements based on the progress of participants in the applications funnel.
A great program starts with a great landing page, this is why Untap offers its customers a unique feature; the program homepage customizer.
After the hackathon launch, things get a little intense; you are supposed to handle several tasks such as manage applications, communicate with judges and mentors, moderate the hackathon community, all in parallel.
As a hackathon organizer, you need to orchestrate the entire event,
In this article, we will cover the first and most crucial phase of your journey, the preparation phase. We put together ten items to check before the launch of the hackathon. Let’s go straight to the first one: