Hackathon Guide and Templates

At Veertly, we have recently run an internal hackathon fully virtually on our own online event platform. We were blown-away by the delivered results, but also the positive feedback by our teams! Hence, we would like to share how to organize a Hackathon, but also give you our templates for free.

Are you interested to learn more which impact the hackathon had on our team morale? Read on here. 

5 steps to organize a Hackathon

1. Define the goals of the hackathon and how you will measure its success.

2. Set a date, define your challenges and invite your staff. Ask every attendee to free up and block their calendars so they have no interruptions.

3. Define the agenda: Make sure your teams can truly focus on the hackathon and think of external mentors, keynote speakers and jury members to spice it up. PS: We organize a pizza lunch so the teams could focus truly on the work. We can highly recommend using PizzaTime to manage all that. 

4. Select an online platform of physical location for your hackathon. Needless to say that we have used the Veertly event platform to run our hackathon. Ist is perfectly suited, because each team can have their rooms and embed collaboration tools, as organizer you can launch polls and send broadcast messages to everyone, you can move people into different event areas and as mentos easily jump in and out of the different team rooms. PS: Don't forget to use the tags to show who belongs to which team.

5. Make sure the event runs smoothly and everyone can focus on their tasks by following the event schedule and be the time police. Try to keep admin efforts and other tasks off the attendee's shoulders. And don't forget to have fun!

Get your free templates to run your Hackathon

We have created the following templates, which we would love to share with you to give you a kick-start to planning and organising your very own hackathon.

• Google sheet (DOWNLOAD) to effectively organize and manage a hackathon
• Hackathon event template (DOWNLOAD) for the Veertly platform (incl. pre-defined rooms, broadcast messages, polls, icebreaker activity and more). You can also check it out here and learn how to use the '.json' file template here.