Forem: Hackathon Camp

3 hackathon announcement email templates

Kevin Peters — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 09:20:16 +0000

Organizing a hackathon is time-intensive. And especially communicating it. Organizers spent many hours crafting messages for internal communication like announcing the hackathon, finding ideas, announcing winners, and many more.

One of the first emails that will send around is the announcement email before the hackathon. In this blog, we will present you with three templates for you to just copy and paste for your hackathon announcement email.

Let us discover what is important for a good announcement email in the following chapters.

Prerequisite

To announce a hackathon you will have to plan your hackathon. We have discovered this topic in "What is an internal hackathon? -> How to organize an internal hackathon" that you can explore. But in short, you will have to figure these things out first before sending an announcement email:

Finding a theme for the hackathon
Figuring out a budget for the hackathon itself

These steps can be only done if leadership approves this idea. So talk with your C-level to bring this idea up. Hackathons are good to market your own company externally or can be used internally to bring people together and increase the average tenure of employees.

What should the hackathon announcement email include?

The hackathon announcement email should include many pieces of information. It is generally split into three parts:

Introduction about the hackathon
Call to action
Additional information

This structure is taken to attract the employees first to the hackathon. The introduction should clearly state the benefit for the employees. It should also mention what the hackathon is about, the dates and what is happening - at least a rough plan. This should answer the following questions

What is the hackathon theme?
When does the hackathon happen?
Where is the hackathon happening? Is it remote-friendly?
What is the main prize?

After that, the employees might have caught enough interest. In the email, you should include a call to action now. Ideally, this is a link to a form where people can sign up. With hackathon.camp you can use the internal form tooling to let people instantly sign up for your hackathon. It is optimized for no friction and supports Google login and SSO for your organization.

After the call to action there is more additional information that you can include in the email:

A link to the rules
What are all the other prizes?
Are there any other restrictions regarding ideas or teams?

Answering all those questions should result in a clear and good announcement email.

Alternative channels to send the announcement

The announcement should be also sent out to alternative channels within and outside the company. Let us start with internal channels.

Team chat

The announcement should also be made public within your team chat. Most teams are using Slack or Microsoft Teams. In channels that are targeting the right people, the announcement should be made. Most often, these are the #general channels or similar.

And when you are at it, feel free to also create a hackathon channel where people can ask questions and get more information about the hackathon.

Internal team meetings

The hackathon should be also announced in internal all-hands meetings. Meetings where everyone in a company somehow participates. With those meetings, you can even target specific departments like engineering or marketing if you are looking for a certain set of people that should participate in the hackathon.

Social Media

The hackathon can be also used for marketing. You might wonder in which way. Your company is likely to have a profile on different social media channels like LinkedIn or Facebook. On those, you can share that your company is organizing a hackathon and it might be a great opportunity for people to apply to your company. You can showcase the nice company culture you have because hackathons are fun events for the employees usually.

The Hackathon Email Templates

In this chapter, we will present the email templates for your next hackathon.

Hackathon Email Template #1

This template is quite a short one. It is ideal if not everything is fleshed out about the hackathon and you just want to generate signups.

Hey {{Insert company names employees}},

We are excited to announce the first hackathon, and invite every one of you to participate! The hackathon will be a 2-day event where you have the chance to participate in a project proposed by one of your colleagues or by yourself. It does not matter if you are an engineer, sales representative, or marketer. In a hackathon, everyone is needed.

The hackathon's theme will be "{{Insert theme}}"
Date: 16-29 of May 2022
Location: Berlin (In-office), San Francisco (In-office), Remote

Early pre-registration form

To be eligible for the submissions, bounties, and prizes that will be announced soon, please register above. We will announce the rules soon.


Thanks, {{Insert name}}

Hackathon Email Template #2

This template is mostly used if you want to include a lot more information in the hackathon announcement email. It is a bit longer and takes a bit longer to read.

Hey <Insert company names employees>,

Our <next/first> hackathon is happening! What is a hackathon you might ask? We will organize an internal company event where you can get together with colleagues, from random teams to deliver a small-scoped project. No matter your background, you will find a spot.

The hackathon will evolve around the topic of <insert theme> and we are happy to invite y'all to this event. Some data about the hackathon:

Date: <16-29 of May 2022>
Location: <Berlin (In-office), San Francisco (In-office), Remote>
Slack Channel: <#hackathon-2022>

<Early pre-registration form>

Prizes include:

<Swag for every participant>
<Each participant of a winning team of a category will receive $1000 in an Amazon gift card>
The rules around the hackathon are the following:

<Teams can consist of a maximum of 5 people>
<Committee members are not able to join the hackathon as a participant>
<You will have a budget of $500 per team to spend on food or other third-party costs>
<All projects must be submitted via hackathon.camp>
<...>
Thanks, <Insert name>

Hackathon Email Template #3

This is an email template that includes a FAQ section as well.

Hey <Insert company names employees>,

We are pleased to announce that a hackathon will happen soon. The hackathon will be themed around <insert theme>. Everyone in this company can participate. It does not matter if you are an engineer, designer, or sales representative.

Date: <16-29 of May 2022>
Location: <Berlin (In-office), San Francisco (In-office), Remote>
Slack Channel: <#hackathon-2022>

<Early pre-registration form>


Frequently asked questions

What is a hackathon?

A hackathon is an event where small teams of random internal colleagues will work together on a project to ship it. In the hackathon, multiple teams will participate and there will be winning teams for different categories that will receive prizes.

What are the rules?

The rules of the hackathon will be published shortly. Sign up or follow the slack channel linked above.

What are the prizes?

Each participant of a winning team will receive a <USD 75 gift card from Amazon>.


Thanks, <Insert name>

What is an internal hackathon?

Kevin Peters — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 06:17:29 +0000

An internal hackathon is an event that you hold in your organization internally. The event builds around the idea of creating projects together with smaller groups in a limited time frame. There will be winning projects with prizes and many cool other activities during the hackathon.

Internal hackathons usually aim to bring employees closer together. They can help form a bond between employees. Ideally, they can contribute to a better company climate and could also empower people to stay longer within your company.

Ideas for themes of an internal hackathon

Finding a theme for an internal hackathon can be pretty challenging. First of all, you have to decide what kind of hackathon you want to create. There are two kinds:

Business-oriented
Fun-oriented

Both forms of hackathons have their advantages and disadvantages. Business-oriented hackathons normally involve the product or project your team is working on. The biggest advantage is that your colleagues spend time with your product and build solutions around or on top of it. This kind of hackathon brought many cool new ideas to companies like Spotify. Spotify, for example, organized many “hack weeks” which are a type of hackathon as well. In these “hack weeks” the company mostly focuses on building internal solutions to make the life of employees at Spotify easier or to improve the customer experience. You can see this in the article “Dogfooding developer products: gathering insights from internal hackathons”. Most themes focus around internal tooling, the usage of one internal product, or streamlining internal workflows or processes.

Fun-oriented hackathons, on the other hand, mostly cover generic topics with their main purpose being bringing the company together. These are not so much about moving forward business-wise, but increasing employee happiness.

Most fun topics are about something that excites employees, ranging from something technical like Crypto to movies. Social applications that connect people are often built in these kinds of hackathons. Projects within fun-oriented hackathons can still include projects that benefit the company though. For example, people could create an app or web app to connect people for lunches or other activities.

How to organize an internal hackathon

Organizing a hackathon is tedious and time-consuming. A hackathon organizer's tasks usually include:

Finding a topic for the hackathon
Preparing marketing material to attract participants for the hackathon
Creating a form to collect ideas
Sending out a form to every employee to collect their ideas
Sending out a form to every employee to gather their team or project preferences
Organizing and assigning teams
Getting feedback and reshuffling teams
Scheduling the whole hackathon from an opening presentation, when teams work on their projects, pizza breaks, and other activities during the hackathon up until the hackathon end
Assigning meeting rooms or creating virtual meetings using zoom, hangouts, or other platforms for the teams
Providing all the tools needed to work on projects like GitHub repositories, Figma projects, and similar
Creating an opening presentation and holding the opening presentation
Organizing food during the event
Collecting all ideas at the end in form of a presentation or similar
Organizing a presentation where each team can showcase their project
Organizing voting can happen in different ways. For example with a jury or open voting by the whole company
Figuring and handing over the prize for winning projects

As you can see the process of organizing an internal hackathon is quite extensive. Us from hackathon.camp recommend taking at least one month to prepare for the hackathon alone. You can speed up the whole process by using our tool though, as we provide templates for most of the communication you will be sending out and automate everything about the process from team assignments to voting.

Another tip is to find multiple hackathon organizers. By splitting the workload of the organization you will keep yourself sane and can get a smoother experience during the hackathon. Make sure that everyone knows what their tasks are, though.

Team organization and keeping the teams up to date with the schedule is something you should spend some time on. These tasks are often the most time-consuming activities, especially when done wrong. Try to assign teams before the hackathon starts. This will ensure that teams can talk together before the hackathon and can expect to work in a group together right away rather than spending trying to find the “perfect” group.

Keeping up with the schedule of the hackathon is also really difficult. Most people do not check a schedule actively, so it is part of the organizers' responsibility to keep the participants up to date. You can do this by publishing a schedule way ahead of the hackathon, ideally in some kind of calendar view. When changes to the schedule happen, like when food deliveries take longer than expected, resulting in subsequent hackathon events being delayed, send a message to every participant that the schedule has changed. Ideally, give the participants some extra time to work on their projects.

Things not to do during the hackathon

As a hackathon organizer, do not participate in the hackathon. You are there to organize, answer all the questions about the event, schedule the milestones, and collect all the data regarding the hackathon. Be there for your employees help them however you can. If someone does not want to work on a specific project you have assigned them to, help them find another solution. There is always a solution!

As we mentioned earlier, do not wait until the main day of the event to organize teams. It will make the process much easier if you plan and assign teams in advance. Another thing we have seen that work well at hackathon.camp is to set some rules, but not to be too restrictive. This is important to keep participants moving within a set of boundaries while allowing them to use their creativity to find good and interesting projects.