More Than Bounties & Pizza: How to Organize the Hackathon that Everyone Wants

Hackathons are some of the most anticipated tech events over the past couple decades — and it’s not just for the free food. With virtual hackathons, more people can participate in the hacking, which means more possibilities for magic to happen: More talent to recruit, more ideas to take form, more networking, and — for web3 companies — more protocol activity.

So how do you design a hackathon that people love? There are some widely accepted best practices, but we at Quidli have a suggestion to make yours the highlight of everyone’s year.

Establish goals & desired outcomes

Before spinning up a Discord server, you’ll need to identify the objectives of your hackathon. For example, an L1 may want projects that simply utilize their protocol, whereas a sustainability conference may want a solution that addresses a particular UN Sustainable Development Goal, with no regard for which protocol is used.

Whatever you plan to achieve, make sure you define the judging criteria as much as possible for participants! Some questions to consider while planning:

• What problem or prompt should the project address?
• How long is the hackathon?
• Do you need to see a working demo?
• How much of the product needs to be built?
• What criteria do judges need to consider?
• What will come of the projects and products from this hackathon?

All of this information needs to be readily available so that participants aren’t asking the same questions multiple times (hopefully). The discord in your Discord should be centered around building teams and your product.

Foster communication in your server

In their research on hackathons, Crypto and Research Design Lab (CRADL) found that people have different reasons for attending, as well as varying skill levels. As a result, building (or joining) a team can be a challenging task for hackathon participants.

Instead of just a space for pitching project ideas and making announcements, organizers should use their Discord to orchestrate robust networking and icebreaker events. For both virtual and IRL hackathons, online meet-and-greet sessions can help participants connect, especially if the hackathon isn’t geographically restricted (the beauty of virtual hackathons!).

A Discord networking event could take place in a voice channel, where a moderator starts the conversation with an icebreaker prompt. You can also organize asynchronous networking “events” by regularly posting prompts for community members to answer. It can be a short question or poll that asks people to respond with an emoji reaction, or you can ask members to share a photo of their current environment.

To add an even more engaged layer to these networking events, you can introduce token rewards to the conversation with Quidli.

Get momentum going with token rewards

While connection and building are primary drivers for your Discord chatter, a little monetary appreciation can add a layer of fun while also incentivizing hackathon participants. As part of a voice channel event, you can distribute token rewards via Quidli to participants who foster great conversations, or to attendees who form a team during the call.

You can also offer a range of token rewards for activities like bug fixes or continued development. Communities can reward members for tasks like:

• Registering for the next hackathon
• Sharing feedback
• Answering FAQs
• Mentoring hackers

But even cooler than that, your community members can also set up their own specific tasks with token rewards on Quidli. For example, if someone wants your community to test the latest version of the product they built, they can create a bounty themselves!

And don’t forget to reward your own team, too. Fostering community isn’t just about engaging end users — the hackathon team also deserves recognition from both each other and participants.

Your hackathon is just the beginning

A hackathon’s success isn’t only achieved during the event itself — it plants the seeds for further collaboration and a stronger community. And token rewards are a great way to keep the momentum going.

If you haven’t already, check out Quidli to level up your hackathon with tokenized rewards.

Want to embed crypto incentives into your organization’s collaboration & coordination workflows? Create your Quidli account and get started now!

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