How to organize a Defy Series Hackathon

I’ve had the experience of being in the organization committee of 2 hackathons at my club, and a multitude of experience in just organizing events in general.
As I prep for the Defy25 hackathon as one of the core committee members, here are some things to remember when hosting another hackathon at this campus. My notes might be helpful for myself, or maybe my juniors down the line, hence the post.

Pre D-Day prep

1. Get the dates clear.

Getting this clear is paramount. Remember one thing, set it a minimum of 4-6 months in advance if you are planning for a huge flagship hackathon with sponsors. Do not budge on the date after it is set unless it is an absolute emergency (the venue got booked by college management, natural disasters, etc). Your procrastination does NOT constitute an emergency.

Things to keep in mind when setting the date:

• Always account for any big events in the semester and plan it before or after the big event. Fall semesters have Technovit and Winter semesters have Vibrance. Try to aim for dates before these big events, as the hype is great and people are usually looking to take a break from academics after CAT1. After the big event is usually a no because most of the college students would have low/exhausted their OD quota for the semester. This is at least, what I have observed over the years.
• Host it on weekends. This is the easiest way to not deal with OD issues and SWC appreciates events that happen in campus that doesn’t involve people bunking their classes to attend them. It helps to be on their good side, and the lesser ODs you process, the more your chances of winning the best club award goes up. Hosting it on weekends also give the benefit of some exclusive sponsors like MLH who only partner with you if you host it on the weekend.

Once you set the date, do not postpone or prepone by any means.

Set your footfall expectations.

Set a realistic goal of how many teams will be at the venue. This should be highly dependent on what type of event this is, how confident you are in raking in a good amount of people, how approachable the event is to the conventional audience. For example something like a really niche web3 technology doesn’t usually pique the interest of a lot of people, so it helps to expect a smaller footfall. As for hackathons however, people love testing out their skills over the time period even if it is niche technology, so expect a lot of people. Hackathons also have a large network effect which boosts footfall a lot. Remember not to stuff the venue too.

2. Book the venue.

Booking the venue usually takes place with the help of the faculty coordinator, so this means you will be working close with him to observe all the venues and book the right one at the right dates. Account for any pre-events or inauguration you might have, which would mean you would have to book other events in the same day as well.

Things to note:

• Optimize for participant experience. If it is a short workshop, go for the smaller auditoriums like Kamaraj or Nethaji. If it is a small hackathon, go for Kasthuribai hall which is at the bottom of MG auditorium. If you are dead set that this is going to be a big event, go straight to MG, as it has the best participant experience,
• Better to have a house-full small venue than a half-filled big venue. It looks like a successful event in the geo-tag pics, and helps to usually make the external speakers (if any) feel a little bit more comfortable addressing the crowd. No speaker has felt great addressing a half filled venue, and it makes a bad impression with them. So yes, avoid big venues if you cannot promise the footfall to fill them up at-least by 60%.

Once you set the dates and the venue is booked, go ahead and make the devfolio page as soon as possible. It only asks for minimal branding, which you can do immediately and put up the page. Remember to select OFFLINE when asked for mode, and select the venue on the map accurately. Check, and double check if your email is visible on the main page so people can contact you for queries.

3. Make the sponsorship benefits tier list.

First off, have a realistic goal of how much money you plan to get through sponsorships. This number should largely be derived from your previous hackathon sponsorship numbers, and a combination of all the projected expenses you foresee for this hackathon, which includes, merch, standees, posters, banners, food and miscellaneous. Once that is done, now sit and sketch out how you can provide value to the users. You can help them by giving them stall spaces, a slot for their workshop during/before the hackathon, giving them the responsibility of being a judge, so on and so forth.
Now, take these benefits and arrange them in the order of most to least impact to the company. Demarcate the tiers of sponsorship using these benefits, with least impact benefits at the lower tiers and the highest impact benefits on the top tiers.
Discuss this, take your time and optimize it for money as well as quantity of companies. You might get the same amount of money with 2-3 big/title sponsors, but there usually isn’t a lot of credibility for the registrants on this hackathon. It also creates single points of failure, depending too much on a low amount of sponsors would wreck the hackathon (true story) if they pulled out at the last minute. Think of the standee with all the sponsor logos. Your goal should be to fill it up with as many logos as possible, even if it means getting small amounts of money from each company. Diversify, but also make sure you get at least one title sponsor. With all this in mind, adjust the pricing for each tier and make a big jump in cost between the low-unserious sponsors and the title/pro sponsors. This way it automatically filters out the sponsors without much verbal hardwork. Also, remember to account for taxes, adjust the pricing so that you have a decent sum left over after Nirmala Tai takes the share.

4. Make the brochure.

If you or your club have past experiences with hackathons, it helps to show it off on the brochure to build credibility and trust. If you have statistics from the last version of the same hackathon, superb. Include it all in the brochure. Include the most important statistics, like footfall, projects, devfolio registrations, final participants, review stars (avg), basically every stat you think a sponsor might find important/impressive.
Mention the dates and the venue clearly in the brochure. Show some neat pics of the venue in the brochure so they get an idea of how it looks.
Finally, at the end make a good looking graphic to show off the sponsorship tiers. Be clear in your expectations, and include all of the plans. Include a special bounty-only sponsorship beneficiary option as well, because some companies would like that. Make sure you give them ample contacts (email, telegram, whatsapp, phone number) for them to contact you, and include a clause that goes along the lines of “If you require any more specific deliverables from us, please feel free to reach out and set up a meeting with us so we can decide where it lies in the sponsorship pricing.” This is super important because the sponsors might usually have some weird requests that might not fall under your sponsorship tracks discretely, which you can entertain and price separately after negotiating with them.

5. Find the targets.

First make a huge, exhaustive list of every company you plan to approach. Arrange them by priority, the aspects you should compare them should be how big they are, how much funding you think they might give, how interested they are in sponsoring events like these, their past sponsorship history, degree of closeness to their developer relations, etc. Now, find a POC for each of these companies and their contacts. Cold DM on twitter, be active on telegram, work around your network, your seniors network, their senior network and so on and so forth.

Usually to do this, you need to be active in the space. If you are in the DAO, I suggest you go to a couple of external hackathons in India, something along to the likes of EthMumbai, EthIndia or any hacker houses held in Bangalore or Goa. Meet every devrel there and build up rapport and get their contacts. Tell them point blank that this hackathon you are planning to host will be one of the biggest ones in the south Indian space, and since most of the web3 projects don’t have much reach at the south, this usually helps to get them onboard.

Once, the list is made, work your way downwards through it. DM them all, set up meetings, fill up your calendar properly with their slots. DO NOT clash any slots or double book meetings, it sets a very bad first impression.

6. Yap time

Now that the meetings have been set up, you will now have to form a Sponsorships Strike Team of 4-5 people. Remember to attend every meeting with at least 3 people from your side. This helps to have witnesses in the discussions who can corroborate on the terms discussed. If you had dealt with the sponsors alone, it would mean if they did any changes to their deliverables it would only be your word against them. Avoid that at all costs.

Negotiation tips:

• Do your homework. See what their product is. How it fits into the hackathon. Which track you think they might belong to. You usually can get a rough estimate of how serious they are when it comes to sponsorships by seeing their landing page quality and their past history of sponsorships.
• Think about what you could do to help them the most. Think from their perspective and find out what part of this hackathon will give them the most return on their investment. Usually chains and tech would want the participants to play around and incorporate their SDKs in their final submissions, which means they would love bounties. Find out what the chain is good at, and try to upsell them to a track or title sponsorship. For example, a DeFi centric chain would make a sick track sponsor for the DeFi track in the hackathon, whereas a crypto wallet application would benefit the most from a workshop session and a promise of x users.
• Underpromise, overdeliver. Try to maximize their deliverables and try to minimize your deliverables. Try not to offer too many x users to their app, keep the number low and blow their minds by overdelivering.
• Ask for merch. The merch is an important souvenir. Even the most critical dude on the planet cannot turn down free stuff. This is a weapon you could use to get a lot of people’s eyeballs on your club. Just handing out free shit creates loyalists to the club, at the OC as well as the participants side. See if you can negotiate a good amount of merch that tries to cover everyone + 30 OC members.

Talk to them politely, lay the statistics down as a matter of fact, be steadfast in your expectations and finally, don’t be afraid to prod. If you find their requests too much, simply say something along the lines of “This does not sound very equitable to us, I’m not sure how we can fit your requests into the budget” and if they try to get the perks for a lower price, simply say “I’m not sure it would be fair for the other sponsors of the same tier if we could give you the same benefits for this price”.

Post yap

It usually takes 1-2 meetings (usually 30m-1h each) to come to a rigid set of deliverables from both sides. Make sure a strike teammate notes all of this down, compiles a document (called an memorandum of understanding) and gets it signed by them hours after the negotiation ends and the hands have shook. Do NOT waste time. Once signed by both parties and acknowledged, keep the doubly signed copy as safe and accessible as possible.

Now make a group for them and you and add it to a community of hackathon sponsors on Whatsapp. This helps to keep all communication in one place. Get their brand kit so you can get started on the designs. These groups help keep the MoUs, their brandkit and yours in one place, and after the event you could share their pictures to them. Helps a lot to keep it all clean.

Rinse and repeat this process for all the sponsors. Some will leave you on read, some will ghost you after you send them the brochure, some will ghost you after the first meeting, some will ghost you after the second meeting, some will never sign the MoU, some might even ghost you after the MoU has been signed as well (rare but might happen). Prepare for all of this. Don’t take it to the heart, sponsorships are a numbers game, and there is nothing personal about transactions. Take it easy and aim for 2-3 lakhs to work with.

Keep following up with them forwarding all the account details of VIT’s treasury, whatever’s required. Stay on high alert and do not make any delays in responding to their messages. Offramp the money from VIT’s treasury (takes a lot of effort, and follow-ups to SWC and accounts dept in admin block) into your faculty coordinator’s bank account. You can usually breathe a sigh of relief here.

7. Brand and Graphic design

Here is where the fun part begins. This is to be done by the rest of the organizers when the strike team is looking for sponsors. Saves a lot of time when working in parallel. There are a lot of resources to cook graphically that you will/might need. I divide these resources into 3 sections.

Section 0: The vibe

• You’re going to need a moodboard on pinterest. Start adding pins you think resonates with the brand of the hackathon. Something like this:
• Now, you’re gonna need a spotify playlist. Add music which you think resonates with the vibe of the hackathon. We are going to use this music for the reels that we are going to put out.

Section 1: Foundation materials

• This is the very foundation of your brand.
• You need to decide the colour scheme, font and the narrative behind the design choices. Make a small document having the hex codes of the brand colours, the logo versions (the small version, the large version, the black version, the white version, the gray version) and write a couple of paragraphs on what the brand is intended to make the participants feel. Defy usually has a rebellious industrial vibe with a noxious green that is very recognizable. The narrative is that this is a new type of hackathon and its for misfits who don’t fit into the norm. Come up with a narrative like that, or if you are only going to repeat a hackathon series, either keep the same narrative (highly recommended) or improve upon it without destroying its initial vibe.
• Along with the logo, decide on the secondary and tertiary typefaces as well. This is for making posts and posters with a solid branding style.

Section 2: Static materials

This includes basically everything that is static.

• Profile pictures for all social media handles
• Banner for twitter
• Instagram post backgrounds
• Lanyard and ID designs
• Website background
• Community partners announcement posts
• Sponsors announcement posts
• Judges announcement posts

Section 3: Video materials

• A splashscreen animation for between the ad segues at the hackathon (LINK EXAMPLE) Think of it like the OBS transitions that streamers have.
• A logo animation. Nothing longer than 3 seconds.
• Sponsor highlight clips.
• A promo reel. This needs narrative. It needs to resonate with everyone who is going to watch it. Here is an example of what we came up with for defy25.
• A venue reveal reel. Try to take interesting shots of the venue, maybe even try using drone shots after getting permission to make it look really cool.
• An aftermovie. This is for editing after the hackathon, but helps to keep in mind
• A BTS reel. Again, this is to improve camaraderie within the club members and is to be edited and released after the hackathon.

8. Community Partners

Okay, so now you should have the money to make this hackathon a reality (from the sponsors) and the means to amplify this hackathon (using your brand graphic design and editing). But nothing exponentially boosts reach as much as collaborating with already well established and entrenched web3 communities. Reach out to all of these community admins. Sign a small MoU with them asking for amplification on all of their channels and their social media about our hackathon, and in return we also amplify their communities with our social media. Go for active communities where you are certain that the target audience exist. Clubs from other campuses make really good community partners since they are entrenched at their campus and have the following of developers there. Try reaching out to the DAOs and the blockchain communities who are regional, i.e, based out of Chennai. It’s pretty much a no-brainer.

Get this done early before the hackathon, and remember to exchange the brand kits of both sides with each other. Announce your community partnership and make sure your posts get immediately amplified ASAP after you post them.

9. Judges and mentors

Now, you will need to seek out judges in the space who are good at what they do, and know their stuff.

• For mentors, who will stay on-site and help out participants and guide them with their errors and bugs in their dapp, you can bring over seniors who are available in the campus. Make sure you have a web3 experienced mentor and also a frontend experienced one because they have the most common bugs. Make sure the OC members have seasoned devs too, so they can play a double role as a mentor and as an OC whenever required.
• Mentors are also useful to help the participants ideate their projects, and build upon their MVPs. I personally had so much fun ideating with the participants
• For judges, try to strike a balance between startup-business experience as well as web3 experience. The way to do this is to try and seek out angel investors or guides who are active in the web3 startups space. They make the best judges. Additionally go for devs who are really active in the web3 space. You could also bring in a business-advisory oriented expert who doesn’t have a web3 background, that would make things interesting as the finalists would be forced to explain web3 jargon to this person as well, which is important if we need to bring web3 to the masses.

Talk to all of your prospective judges, clear up the eligibility criteria you want them to use when judging the finalists. Also remember to discuss the timings of their judging slots well in prior so that they don’t have any issues with their schedule. Make sure you adhere to these timings without any delay (case in point: defy25) or else you will have to make some tough calls (we had to let go of a judge at the end before the pitching session)

10. Food

You need food. Don’t even bother doing the hackathon without food. Even 24 hours without food will either starve the participants or inconvenience them into getting their own food from Gazebo which only wastes their time. I personally had to experience this bullshit in 2 hackathons at campus, and its a big nono.

Hostel mess have incredible food for a good price. The quotes have probably changed since the last time we did a defy, but it definitely shouldn’t exceed 70k for 3 meals. Throw in some snacks as well, near the evenings. Make sure you hand out coffee and tea at midnight as well, its super appreciated by the participants, as well as a great dose of caffeine for the OC members as well.

There are multiple messes within campus which offer food on an order basis for hackathons, but do your research and find out which one gives the best bang for the buck from other clubs and their hackathon experiences. In our experience from Defy25, we ordered from Fusion, and it was pretty okay. The breakfast was pretty good.

The food will cost you a substantial fraction of the entire in-hand budget. And you shouldn’t try cutting corners here. Make sure you get the highest quality food for the participants.

Mostly, the messes send over exactly one dude to serve the food to the participants, which is by no means fast and creates a bottleneck at the serving area. Prepare to assign 2-3 juniors of yours to serve the participants as well. It speeds up the process. Also, you will need a couple or 3 OC members making sure when the food is being offered at night or early mornings, the participants don’t exit the premises (the security gets pissed off for some reason) so account for that as well.

11. Assemble the Organizing Committee.

So that’s pretty much everything. Its time to assemble the OC. Here are some things to keep in mind.

1. Do NOT keep the OC homogenously dayscholars or hostelers. Dayscholars are required because you might require some last minute purchases to be done, and they could simply just take their vehicle, go to some shop outside, buy the stuff and then come back. Blinkit is unreliable. On the other hand, hostelers are cool because you’ll need them to manage stuff after the hackathon like account settlements because dayscholar’s timetables don’t have a lot of free time before bus.
2. Remember to include some girls. I hope the situation isn’t so dire that there are simply no girls in the club to become OC members, because you’ll need them to run point on the sleeping green rooms behind the stage during night, where only female participants are allowed to take a nap. Boys aren’t allowed there, boys should be made to sleep at the hall under the auditorium.
3. Finally, throw in a good amount of new joinees/freshers/juniors. The hackathon is an incredible time period where you can spend an extended amount of time simply just getting to know other club members deeply and inspire them about the club. This is a great time to create some amazing club memories, inspire the freshers and create some loyalists. This is super important for the future of the club. The more core memories you make, the more hope you have at the club surviving another year. This was something we lacked last year. A massive lack of events where the club members could congregate and meet each other, in my opinion, crippled the club activity. Also, freshers make incredible grunt workers 💀

12. Printing time

Finally, its time to make your wonderful designs to a reality. There’s actually a lot of things you will be printing, and if you’ve done everything right, and you have money, you should be printing all of these things (ideally). But, ofc, if that isn’t possible, feel free to gut this list according to your budget. I’ve arranged all the materials by priority, so if you are removing things, do NOT remove the top things first, start from the bottom and work your way up.

First step would be to forward a google form to the OC group asking for their tshirt sizes, a profile picture of their choice to be included in the ID card.

Materials to print:

1. Certificates: Printed certificates are only for the finalists. We did top 9, so that was a total of 9x5(in a team) = 45 certificates. Print extra (like PUHLEASE). Just in case there’s an error when writing the certificates.
2. ID cards: customized with OC member names and profile pictures if time allows. Otherwise print one with a blank, fill it up with the name using a marker at the venue.
3. Tshirts for the OC. Forward a form in the OC group asking for all of their sizes and try to print 2-3 extra M or L sizes just in case someone makes a last minute appearance in the OC.
4. Lanyards. Designer lanyards (if affordable) will look awesome. But solid colour ones will cut it too. Just make sure there is visual difference between the participant lanyards and the OC’s.
5. Cups with the defy logo on that thing. This is a nice gift you could give to the guests and SWC officials, they love this. If any is left over, you could raffle them off to the participants, make them do some weird tasks like 26 (for defy26 lmao) pushups or something.
6. Stickers. Have 1 or 2 stickers which read out defy(xx), and also throw in some meme stickers but with the branding colours of defy. Something that you yourself see sticking it on your laptop.
7. Posters. We had printed some great defy artwork someone made on some cheap glossy paper and handed it as part of their merch kit back in ‘24. Try getting someone in the club to make the artwork.
8. Banners. This is important and also be careful with this. The SWC just banned the installation of banners in ABs and north square. If you are planning to purchase this, simply know that you will only be installing this within the auditorium only. Maybe you could print one for the main gate, so the externals know they have arrived at the right place. Make sure you have permissions!
9. Standees. Print a bunch of this. You will need one of these outside the auditorium to show people that this is the place, and you will need one more with all the sponsors so people can take selfies with. Print 2 minimum. Ask the sponsors to bring their own standees to advertise their product better.
10. Tote bags: We did this in 24, has insane utilitarian value and branding travels far and wide thanks to this tote bag. Do not underestimate the tote bag.
11. Badges: Again, we did this in 24, and its pretty nice. Looks cute if you put it on your ID card.

13. Mails to ask permissions

Oh boy. So by this time the D-Day should be really close, like a week ideally. You will need to send a lot of mails to acquire permission for a variety of things.

1. Food mails: These are mails to the hostel warden to get his permission for the mess food to be made and delivered to the auditorium. Some mails from the mess itself to finalize the quote for the food.

D-Day

• Make sure the tables are set properly.
• Make sure there is a team at the entrance seated with CHARGED laptops ready to check people in as they arrive. Get them seated 1-2 hours before the hackathon even begins as participants coming from far away tend to usually come early.
• Get puja stuff ready. Flowers, a bunch of candles (to light up the lamp), matches (lighter better and quicker). MG management people should have this, I don’t really know. Confirm prior, get it from outside if unavailable. Send out a dayscholar in a vehicle.

(still very much a WIP! if this is still there pls prod me more to finish this lmao)