Spring Ahead With Hackathon 4
As winter relinquishes its icy grip, we observe with delight, as new blossoms and life break through the snow. Every year at this time we rejoice in this cycle or rebirth and rejuvenation. If innovation were a season, it would definitely be Spring.
This release, we look to harness that feeling of anew, and bring to you several platform wide updates, as well as a focus on our Brightidea Hackathon solution.
This past year, our Hackathon solution has empowered companies, and we have seen an exponential growth in its utilization. We see one new event launched every four days, with more than 150,000 sessions around the world.
Now, we’re thrilled to unveil a refreshed offering designed to streamline your process, boost engagement, and unlock even greater potential, plus some goodies within our core configurations.
Our Expert Coaches Guide You from Start to Finish
Our team dove deep into our Hackathon offering, developing an enhanced point of view around running a successful, world class Hackathon. Through external research and customer insights, we have developed new assets and guides for our clients to use as a framework for success.
- New and improved Hackathon playbook, which you can find within our apps pillar in the product as well as our updated Knowledge Base Article.
- A detailed Hackathon wiki offering best practices and key activities needed to drive external or internal Hackathons.
- Updated engagement structure for pulling the Professional Services team into the event to help advise, collaborate, or guide your teams.
Self-Guided Participant Onboarding
Team building and making the right connections can unlock not only the success of a project, but also help scale the event across the organization. Some critical updates:
- Created an in-depth onboarding flow that guides the user through the event registration, surfacing the most valuable tools to them based on their use case. This includes access to Project Room, teammate search, etc.
- Created a holistic participant page where users can search and recruit teammates by expertise, certifications, availability, etc.
- Enhanced application process lets participants apply to specific teams, and existing members can accept, reject and message those prospects.
Custom Evaluator Ordering and Navigation
Hackathon judges will often be executive, c-suite members or external partners who do not regularly login to system, which means administrators are carrying the burden of logging them in, guiding them to the right action item, and monitoring for completion. Well, we heard you and we now have updated features to help.
- Admins can manually update the order of projects, which will be reflected on all action item manage and completion pages.
- Introduced the ability to send an ad hoc email to the evaluators to quickly remind them of the action item location and actions they may need to take.
- Added main navigation links to direct judges to their open action items. Also have the ability for admins to copy the link and send directly to the evaluators.
Tools & Techniques for Admins
Forget time-consuming configuration. Our platform is now prepped to launch a successful Hackathon out of the box.
- Updated the default configuration. This includes more direct statuses, a recommended template for the use of categories, and more defined steps and stages to allude to multiple rounds of evaluations.
- Experience a streamlined event-focused design with our new Hackathon event site view. Inspired by our intuitive Memo and Idea Box interfaces, it ensures participants and evaluators get straight to the action, ideal for departmental Hackathons with defined scope and event phases.
- Enabled View Idea 3 as the default record view for some of our most utilized apps; Idea Box, Memo, Gig, Hackathon.
Additional Brightidea Innovation Cloud Updates
Our team has worked diligently in bringing upgrades across the platform to ease usability across our entire toolset. This includes:
- Updates to our submission form, including the ability to invite users to register directly from the teammate field, as well as the ability to add a Whiteboard directly onto your submission.
- Multiple Project Room updates to support management of your teams and ideas, including automating the creation via the rules engine.
- Continuous improvement to our Rich Text/HTML 2.0 widget, including the support of HTML5 tags.
Our Work Continues…
In this ever-evolving landscape of innovation, we wish you continued growth and the realization of your full potential.
And just know, we are right there with you, already hard at work synthesizing even more exciting features for the Summer and Fall releases, so stay tuned. We can’t wait to share what’s next on the horizon, just through the clouds. ☁️
Stay Bright,
The Brightidea team
