INTRODUCTION

We are FundYourHack and we Fuel your Hackathon, Fast!! Our platform allows users to filter through potential sponsors by criteria like event size, location, and type, helping them discover the right match with ease—all for free.

FRAMING THE PROBLEM

How can hackathon organizers quickly and effectively connect with the right sponsors to bring their event visions to life? Despite the popularity of hackathons, organizers face an overwhelming and time-consuming process of finding sponsors that align with their specific event needs. This challenge leaves organizers without the support they need, while sponsors miss out on valuable, targeted opportunities. A study by the Eastside Rooms found that 45% of association and not-for-profit respondents struggle to find sponsors for their events. Our platform streamlines this process, empowering organizers to find ideal sponsors efficiently. We solve the difficulty hackathon organisers face in finding and securing sponsors that match the specific needs of their events. It affects:

1. Hackathon Organizers: The primary users of the tool who save time and effort by filtering sponsors based on attendee size, location, and hackathon type.
2. Sponsors: While not direct users, they benefit from receiving more relevant sponsorship requests from organizers who align with their goals.

IDEA EXPLANATION

Our platform is an advanced search tool that connects hackathon organizers with sponsors based on specific criteria like expected attendance, location, and hackathon type. By simplifying this matchmaking process, we help organizers quickly identify suitable partners, leading to more effective sponsorships and maximizing their potential with minimal effort. Essentially finding sponsors that have sponsored similar events. We scrape DevPost hackathons and gather a list of 3066 potential sponsors. This information is then stored in a NoSQL database (JSON file) and inputted into a react app. This project focuses on optimising the organiser's experience rather than the attendees.

TECH STACK

We used BeautifulSoup Library and Python for web scraping. We scrapped Devpost, compromising the largest hackathon events organised and publicly available. The information gathered was used to implement the search functionality. The user can filter through a bank of sponsors to cater to their specific target. Selenium was then used to remove the limitation on the amount of data scrapped and automate the process to save time.

We used React and Material UI to offer an attractive user experience and smooth performance. The Material UI centres around accessibility and consistent design, its ease of use made it possible to harmonise with the design of the HackathonParty's User Interface to embed our vision that our tool can be potentially leveraged to remove the pain points of researching and pitching to sponsors.

TECHNICAL DEEP DIVE

Selenium was used since devpost.com does not load all available hackathons at once. Therefore, an automatic scroll script collected more hackathon URLs as it loaded more resources. The other resources was collected with a combination of BeautifulSoup and the requests module.

This project scrapes 3066 unique sponsors and over 1000 hackathons from DevPost. Our logic follows that if the sponsors have previously sponsored hackathons, they are likely to sponsor again. The returned data is a JSON file that is formatted for each sponsor by the following:

"www.stickergiant.com": {
        "participants_num": 6640,
        "hackathon_num": 13,
        "name": "StickerGiant",
        "logo": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/challengepost/sponsors/logos/000/036/208/highres/StickerGiant-Retina-Logo2x.png",
        "keywords": [
            "Beginner Friendly",
            "Social Good",
            "Low/No Code",
            "Databases",
            "DevOps",
            "Machine Learning/AI",
            "Education",
            "Open Ended",
            "Productivity",
            "AR/VR",
            "Web"
        ],
        "locations": [
            "Online",
            "Concordia University John Molson School of Business Building"
        ]
    }

• Keywords and locations specify the types of hackathons the sponsor has been involved with
• hackathon_num specifies the number of hackathons the sponsor has been involved with
• The participant number is the sum of all the participants for all hackathons so that we can get the average

A react app along with MaterialUI is then used to filter through the results. The search bar is queried by keywords, location, and average attendance with an advanced search.

TIME USAGE

We spent the first portion of the first day brainstorming ideas and problems we think should go in hand with the challenge we have selected.

Charlie and Meriem worked on web scraping while Mohamad and Iman created a mock-up on Figma. Then Charlie, Nicole and Mohammed used React to build the platform and Material UI to style it. Imane created the project logo and the project's initial slides.

We had a working interface implemented before the day ended, Meriem attempted to debug the function that generated urls from the file. Charlie continued to perfect the web scraping portion and integrated it into the web app using Selenium. 

Towards the end, we ran into some issues with pushing changes to the GitHub repository. This was about permission issues which were swiftly rectified with some StackOverflow troubleshooting, which guided us to the relevant commands to fix this.

On day 2, we gathered to have an update on the progress of the project. Mohamad and Charlie have already finished the project to a working stage, Nicole tweaked and fixed the Material UI issues related to the newly updated React code. Iman started the submission process and assembled the details, and Meriem worked in collaboration to write the other sections. Mohamed and Charlie worked on deploying the web app.

Everyone worked on revising, amending and expanding on the document section of the submission, Charlie included the Backend Tech dive and recorded the demo video and everyone continued editing this document and iterating the submission.

CHALLENGES FACED:

Implementing a working search function

• Filters often would return too many results, so we limited to 6 results per search to keep it simple
  Tying the Backend to the frontend
• Needed to move the JSON file into the react project
• Filtering the JSON data by importing it into react. Making the search function filter the results accurately: Pushing changes to GitHub repo, trouble with a member's permissions.
• Issues with the merging

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

We have a fully functioning web app with core features: the search capability to filter through sponsors based on:

• Locations: online/offline or precise city address
• keywords: social good, AI, Low code
• Number of hackathons sponsored: to gauge their willingness and capacity to sponsor future events.
• Average number of attendees: this allows us to measure the sponsor's popularity and hint at the size of the budget, venue capacity and other logistical information. Formed strong connections as a team Created a stylish front-end with a clear user experience.

BUSINESS STRATEGY

Domain registration: $10

Hosting: Shared-$36 VPS -$240

Estimated cost of platform based on hosting $46-$250 per year

Monetization:

1. Featured sponsor spots: Offer sponsors the option to pay for “featured” placements on the platform. These sponsors would appear more prominently in search results or be highlighted as recommended sponsors, which increases visibility without affecting the free access for organizers. -$100 per year
2. Non-Intrusive ads: Include relevant, non-intrusive ads for related services, such as event management tools, tech products, or hackathon-related services. Ads would be strategically placed to avoid interrupting the user experience. -Using a flat fee for ad placement of $200 per year
3. Affiliate Marketing Partnerships: Partner with companies offering complementary services, such as merchandise suppliers, event software, or payment processing tools. For instance, we could display options or recommendations for tools commonly needed by hackathon organizers, earning a referral commission when users click through or make purchases. -Using affiliate revenue from clicks. Eg: If we have 500 visitors and an average CPC of $0.50, the revenue would be: Revenue = 500 visitors×0.50=$250 per month
4. Data Insights for Sponsors: We could offer anonymized trend and insight reports for sponsors, showing aggregated data such as popular locations, attendance sizes, or hackathon themes. Sponsors can pay a subscription fee for access to these insights, which would help them better align their sponsorship goals with hackathon trends. -Subscription-based for ongoing access to insights. $50 per month.

Total Estimated Costs: $250 per year Total Estimated Revenue: $3900 per year Total Estimated Profit: $3650

Note this does not include the marketing costs or engineering costs for the platform and prices can change based on traffic and other criteria.

Next Steps

1. Improving Advanced Search functionality. At the moment only one drop-down option works as intended. This would improve user experience, allowing them to filter through data efficiently.
2. Increase the amount of results displayed. Currently, only a maximum of 6 is shown on the app.
3. Include further data under each sponsorship such as amount of financial expenditure for hackathons, location, contact details.
4. Improve the design to be consistent with the rest of the Hackathon Party website. This includes making changes to the font and input fields.
5. Building a statistics feature included with each sponsor's tile to give an in-depth analysis based on the scraped data.
6. Implementing an emailing service with AI integrated to generate pitch emails based on sponsors' past hackathon data and the organiser's successful events.
7. Using it for gaining sponsors for future hackathons (e.g Hack South West)