Organizing or sponsoring a niche tech event, such as a coding competition, is a surefire way to find talent, increase brand awareness, generate value, and gain traction in niche technical communities.
Overview
- Sponsorship considerations
- Sponsorship benefits of coding competitions
- Getting involved in coding competitions
- Are you a good fit?
- Summary
Sponsorship considerations
Sponsoring coding competitions should be viewed as an investment. Finding the right ones that can deliver the desired results is critical. Here’s what you should think about as a sponsor:
- How will the event impact your KPIs;
- If you are seeking software developers with a specific skill set, consider whether the event can assist you in finding new employees or freelancers;
- Sponsoring a coding competition means your company will receive marketing and brand awareness promotion (such as press releases).
Benefits of coding competition sponsorship
Code competitions help sponsors raise awareness of their products, such as APIs and development tools, and recruit interns, freelancers, and full-time employees. There are additional advantages to sponsoring coding competitions.
- Increasing high-quality networking is critical since organizations are always looking for ways to access specific communities.
- Lead generation is another benefit, since potential customers, and your candidates may also be participating in the coding competition.
- Coding competitions are great for recruiting brand ambassadors because these types of events are good for listening, building relationships, and growing your brand advocate network.
Getting involved in coding competitions
Participating in successful events increases credibility and brand recognition, thereby driving positive PR for organizations. Organize post-event interactions for participants by planning meetups and discussions after the event. As a result of attending these events, you are able to stay up to date with market trends.
Is this for you?
Sponsoring a programming competition can provide many benefits. However, you must choose the right competition in the right format.
There are 2 main ways to organize coding competitions:
- In-house: Developer advocates (or DevRel) or tech recruiters with software engineering backgrounds can plan, organize, and execute these competitions. They will ensure your brand, expectations, and KPIs are met. The estimated annual investment in tooling and expert talent here starts at an annual EUR/USD 120,000. It is rare for companies to have dedicated in-house expertise for such niche tasks, no matter how great the benefit is.
- Outsourced: In most cases, companies reach out to business partners specializing in coding challenges like DevOlympics. Their specialty is finding software developers in a specific geographical area who have a specific computer science domain or expertise. They take on the notion of conception, planning, execution, and KPI measurement and reporting of your event. DevOlympics offers “pilot” packages ranging from EUR/USD 2000.
Conclusion: Even when including expert marketing and promotions, the annual savings are at least EUR/USD 96,000.
This is critical you’re hiring tech talent. In the US and EU, headhunting fees for difficult tech hires average 20%. DevOlympics’ annual fee allows a breakeven in the first 2 hires within the first two months.
The in-house organization is still complex – promotion is crucial
“Why should any software engineer attend your coding competition?”
Developers decide in seconds whether your brand’s tech event is worth their time.
Despite how provocative this question sounds, software engineers spend only up to 5 minutes per week reading all kinds of promotional emails (DevOlympics survey 2021). It is essential that you and your coding competition stand out from these “promotional” emails.
Consider working with a company like DevOlympics that has a well-maintained, active, engaged, and a large database of tech community contacts of all seniority levels when looking for coding competition business partners.
Hidden benefits
Organizing a tech event like a coding competition has several “hidden” benefits too. It is one thing to say your company is valuable, it is another to demonstrate its value.
- It is best practice to send your CTO and other senior engineers to participate in the event since it is a great place to find talent. Participant interactions are enhanced when they serve as mentors or speakers. This is a good strategy for coding competition sponsors since developers remember people who helped them. Mentors from your company can help bring your brand to the attention of software developers who are not yet looking for work.
- Is it a good idea to award prizes in coding competitions?
- We at DevOlympics award the best competition performers with modestly priced, smart engineering swag, like Raspberry Pis, IoT devices, programmable devices, and online course vouchers (on https://www.coursera.org/). Based on our four-year experience, we believe that providing additional incentives can help competition organizers and sponsors attract highly skilled engineering talent. A large percentage of software developers are interested in such incentives.
About DevOlympics’ Service Platform
DevOlympics organizes online and private coding competitions by providing the most comprehensive service platform.
Our platform allows for
- managing participants before, during, and after coding competitions.
- Using our event management services, companies can request unique competition content,
- adjust rules and prizes,
- set event timelines,
- automatically score contestants, and
- manage events from start to finish.
- All of this is done through a transparent and customer-focused account management team available 24/7.
Summary
Organizing a tech event such as a coding competition no longer requires an annual EUR/USD 120,000 investment in dedicated professionals and specialized tools. You now have the option to employ specialist business partners such as DevOlympics.
