Nice To Meet You

Framing the Problem

What is the problem you are trying to solve? Who does it affect?

No-show rates at events, especially at hackathons, represent more than just empty seats—they signify wasted resources, diminished experiences, and lost opportunities for both organisers and participants. While conventional approaches focus on reducing no-shows through reminders and penalties, we're flipping the script by addressing the root cause: understanding what fundamentally motivates people to attend in the first place.

As Dale Carnegie taught, "to arouse in the other person an eager want" is the key to influence. Applied to event attendance, this means tapping into participants' intrinsic motivations rather than simply trying to prevent absence. Whether it's networking, skill development, or recognition, these core motivations can be leveraged throughout the engagement journey.

Research across multiple industries validates this approach. Duolingo's streak system reduced user churn by 85%, while Salesforce's Trailhead program increased event attendance by 40% after badge implementation. These case studies demonstrate that thoughtfully designed gamification systems—when aligned with users' genuine motivations—consistently drive engagement and attendance.

Idea Explanation

What is your idea? How does it fix the problem?

Our solution, "Nice To Meet You", creates a two-pronged approach to transform the pre-event experience:

First, we capture attendee motivations at registration through an intuitive "interest selection" interface, allowing participants to indicate what they hope to gain from the event—whether networking opportunities, skill development, or competitive achievement.

Second, we implement a gamified user profile that transforms the post-registration period from a passive waiting game into an active journey.

This profile features:

• Achievement badges tied to pre-event preparation activities

• Attendance streaks that build psychological investment

• Connections and friends made through the platform, building anticipation to meeting at the event

• Visual progress indicators showing their engagement and interest

The system is designed to increase psychological investment while simultaneously reducing friction points that might prevent attendance. Each interaction builds anticipation while making the path to attendance increasingly clear and compelling. By aligning pre-event activities with attendees' stated interests, we create personalised journeys that make showing up feel like the natural culmination of their investment rather than a separate decision.

Implementation

How do all the pieces fit together? Does your frontend make requests to your backend? Where does your database fit in?

Our implementation enhances the existing hackathon platform with strategic touch-points:

The registration flow now includes an engaging "What interests you most?" section with visually distinct chips for selecting motivations (networking, skills, competition, etc.). These selections feed directly into our user preference database, creating the foundation for personalised engagement.

The event lobby showcases gamified user profiles with badges, streak indicators, and community connection visualisations. Each profile element is designed to trigger recognition and healthy competition among participants.

The backend connects these elements through an engagement engine that tracks user activities, awards badges based on completed actions, and maintains streak counts for consistent interaction. This data drives our communication system, triggering personalised, gamified, visual heavy email communications that invite specific actions aligned with user interests ("Connect with three fellow AI enthusiasts to earn your Networking Pioneer badge" for example).

Challenges

What did you struggle with? How did you overcome it?

Our primary challenge was scope management. With numerous gamification possibilities and engagement strategies available, we risked creating an overwhelming system that would be impractical to implement. We addressed this by:

1. Creating a matrix that evaluated each feature based on implementation complexity and projected impact on attendance

2. Conducting rapid user research and competitors analysis to validate which gamification elements would most effectively drive motivation

3. Focusing on the "minimum viable gamification" that could deliver measurable results for both the product team, the user and the business

Another significant challenge was balancing intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. While badges and rewards provide immediate engagement, we needed to ensure they connected to genuine event value. Our solution was to make this journey from sign-up to showing-up fun.

Accomplishments

What did you learn? What did you accomplish?

Through this project, we've developed a deeper understanding of behavioural design principles and their application to event engagement.

By researching successful gamification implementations across different industries, we've identified transferable patterns that can be applied specifically to the hackathon context, eg. snapchat, Duolingo etc.

We've successfully created a comprehensive engagement system that balances psychological principles with practical implementation constraints. Our solution doesn't just address attendance as an isolated metric but recognises it as part of a holistic engagement journey.

Most importantly, we've designed a system that views users as active participants rather than passive registrants. By recognising their diverse motivations and creating personalised pathways, we've transformed the pre-event experience from a waiting period into an extension of the event itself.

Next Steps

What are the next steps for your project? How can you improve it?

With additional development time, we would enhance our solution in several key directions:

1. Implement more sophisticated motivation analysis, potentially using AI to identify patterns in user behaviour that indicate likelihood of attendance

2. Develop a comprehensive communication strategy with message templates tailored to different user segments and journey stages, making it personal.

3. Create a real-time analytics dashboard allowing organisers to identify engagement gaps and address potential no-shows proactively

4. Expand the gamification elements to include team-based challenges that build pre-event connection

5. Develop post-event continuation mechanisms to maintain engagement between hackathons

6. Build a stronger social media presence and social media strategy to engage before, during and after the event.

We would also conduct A/B testing of different gamification elements to identify which specific mechanics drive the strongest attendance commitment for different user segments.