The Remit
Fires, floods, droughts, polluted air and now this. COVID-19. After the drought and fires in 2019, many of us believed that it simply couldn't get any worse. How utterly and completely wrong we were. Rahm Emanuel famously said "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
Officially now in a recession, surely this must be the best time to do things differently while recognising that our status quo - of the "new normal" of facemasks to protect against toxic fire smoke and viruses - cannot continue on its current trajectory. We feel like everyday people - you and me - needed to be part of the solution to protect against future crises both economically and sustainably.
As such, we undertook a mammoth project - to run a nation-wide virtual hackathon-style event completely voluntarily from partnership sourcing, website development, coordination, and promotion.
Key Considerations
We wanted to extend the target audience to mainstream people like you and me and not just focus on the coding community. This meant that we needed to prepare participants for success on the day of the event. We didn't want to interrupt the flow and momentum of the day of the event though which is why we decided to run workshops in the lead-up to the main event.
We needed partners to help with prizes and organic promotion, volunteers to help teams on the day, speakers, judges, technology to run the event, a website to collect registrations, automated comms, and a budget for paid promotion.
The Solution
Over a period of a few weeks we garnered support from Microsoft, Insync Technology, the Office of the Queensland Entrepreneur, River City Labs, Travello App, Tourism Australia, Grant Thornton, Macpherson Kelley, and many, many others.
We designed and developed the website using Webflow - our platform of choice for it's affordability and powerful design capabilities - and integrated it with our email automation platform using Zapier. This allowed us to automate all of the comms and reduce administration complexity.
We arranged 8 workshops for participants in the week leading up to the event ranging from topics including what to expect from the event, how to build an app in a day, pitching to judges, and other critical areas of knowledge which were delivered using Microsoft Teams Live Events.
The main event, held on July 16, 2020, kicked off with a live panel discussion from industry experts after-which teams - which we had put together specifically to ensure diversity - got together online to hack the problem statement they were focussing on.
Winning teams were then supported by partners to commercialise their ideas which we hope will help stimulate economic growth in uncertain times.
Check out the Live Project link to view the website and to get more information about the event itself.
Contact us to find out how we can help with your next website or event.
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