How to pitch a hackathon to management: a business case to fill in.

Approvers look for five answers. If one is missing, the proposal comes back.

1. Goal: what changes for the company, in one sentence with a number. "Hire two junior marketing analysts by March" can be checked; "drive innovation" can't.
2. Cost: cash spend and people's hours, VAT excluded.
3. Risk: low turnout, personal data, ownership of the submitted work.
4. Time: how many hours, from whom, in which weeks.
5. Result: what you measure and when you decide whether to continue.

Pick one goal. With three goals at once, you can't tell what to measure.

Copy the block into a document, replace the bracketed parts and delete the lines you don't need. One page is enough; two at most.

BUSINESS CASE: [CHALLENGE NAME]
Proposed by: [name, role]. For: [approver]. Date: [date]

1. GOAL
We want to [hire (n) people for (role) / collect proposals on
(problem) / involve (teams) in (topic)] by [date].
We will measure it by: [one metric].

2. HOW WE DO IT TODAY
Today we [post a job ad, screen CVs and interview / use meetings and
email / other].
Cost today: [hours per cycle] × [hourly cost] + [cash costs] = [amount]
What isn't working: [one sentence, with a figure if you have one].

3. WHAT A CHALLENGE CHANGES
[Candidates / colleagues / students] work for [n] weeks on [task] and
submit [deliverable], [alone / in teams].
[Names or roles] evaluate against [3-5 criteria], fixed before
publishing and the same for everyone. Prize: [interview / internship /
a day with the team]. Everyone who submits gets a verifiable
certificate, winner or not, and [individual notes].

4. FULL COSTS (VAT excluded)
Platform: MARA [Launch €67 / Growth €109] a month × [months] = [amount]
  (drafts free; no publishing fee, no per-participant fee)
Prize: [amount, 0 if non-cash]
Other cash costs: [promotion, materials] = [amount]
Organizing: [hours] × [hourly cost] = [amount]
Judging: [submissions] × [minutes per submission] × [judges] ÷ 60
  × [hourly cost] = [amount]
Other roles: [hours] × [hourly cost] = [amount]
Total: [cash] + [team hours in euros] = [amount]
Compared with today: [cost today] minus [total] = [difference]

5. TIME BY ROLE
[Name], organizing: [hours] over [weeks]
[Names], judging: [hours each] between [date] and [date]
[Name], answering questions: [hours per week]
[Name], approval: [one (n)-minute meeting]

6. RISKS AND PARTICIPANT DATA
Low turnout: target [n] submissions, so about [n] sign-ups.
  Channels: [public challenge for the MARA student community / university
  code / private link / other].
  If sign-ups are below [n] by [date]: [we postpone / other].
Personal data: we process [names, emails, CVs, submissions] for
  [purpose]. Privacy notice and legal basis checked by
  [adviser / DPO] by [date].
Submitted work: [who owns it, how we tell participants],
  wording checked by [adviser].
Evaluation: our people decide; the tool gives no scores.

7. 4-WEEK PLAN
Week 1: challenge draft, criteria, prize, judges, data check
Week 2: publish and invite
Week 3: challenge running, announcements and Q&A
Week 4: submissions, judging, results to every participant

8. WHAT WE MEASURE AND WHEN WE DECIDE
We measure: [sign-ups], [submissions], [people interviewed /
proposals with an owner], [hours spent vs planned].
Decision on [date, set before you start]: continue, change or stop.
Decided by: [name].

9. NEXT STEP
We are asking for €[amount] + VAT and [hours] team hours, by [date].
Attached: challenge draft [link].

The 4-week plan fits an internal or hiring challenge with a channel already in place, such as your employees, a partner university or the MARA student community. A hackathon open to the public needs more weeks of promotion: see the online hackathon guide.

The cash lines are few: platform, prize, any promotion. The prize can be non-cash: an interview, an internship, a day with the team.

Hours often go missing from business cases because they never show up on an invoice. Work them out as hours per role times internal hourly cost. For judging, the calculation is submissions × minutes per submission × judges. Time yourself on a sample submission to get the minutes: a long deliverable such as a plan takes longer than a short one.

If you want to show a saving, use only your own numbers: cost today minus cost with the challenge. Don't borrow return percentages from other companies' cases. Every cost line is covered in how much a hackathon costs.

Example with made-up figures, not a real case. A services company wants to hire two junior marketing analysts. Today it posts a job ad, screens CVs and interviews. It proposes a 2-week hiring challenge for students and recent graduates, who work alone and submit an 8-slide launch plan. If the challenge is reserved for a partner university's students, they sign in with their university email. Otherwise they join through the private link that the career services office passes on. Everyone who submits gets individual notes: on MARA the organizer can send them to each person.

The rest of the template, filled in:

• Time: HR 12 hours over 4 weeks; three judges just over 4 hours each in week 4.
• Turnout risk: target 25 submissions. With no previous edition, the company assumes one in four sign-ups will submit, so it needs about 100 sign-ups. If there are fewer than 70 by the end of week 2, the deadline moves back a week and the career services office sends a second message.
• Data and submitted work: privacy notice and legal basis checked by the DPO in week 1. Ownership of the work is set in the challenge rules, which participants see before they join. Participants keep their certificate and portfolio. Legal reviews the wording.
• Measure: people invited to a final interview (target 6) and actual hours against the 38.5 planned.
• Decision: 45 days after the deadline, the marketing lead decides whether to repeat the challenge for the next role.
• Compared with today: [hours spent on the last hiring round for the same role] × [hourly cost] + [job ad spend]. Fill it in with your company's own numbers.

If the decision happens in a meeting, bring five slides, one line each:

1. The problem: what isn't working today, with a number.
2. The proposal: a [n]-week challenge on [task], judged by our people against criteria set in advance.
3. The cost: cash spend and hours by role, next to today's cost.
4. The risks: turnout, data and ownership of the work, each with its answer.
5. The ask: amount, hours, approval date and the date you will review the result.

After slide five, show the challenge draft.

"It costs too much." Separate cash and hours. On MARA the cash spend is the subscription: €67 a month on Launch, VAT excluded, with no publishing or per-participant fee. The prize can be an interview or a day with the team. The rest is hours: put them next to the hours today's process already takes.

"We don't have time." Write hours per person and per week, not a vague total. On MARA the brief, rules, criteria and timeline start from a draft MARA AI writes in minutes, which you then review. Judging stays manageable if you fix the number of finalists in advance.

"What if nobody takes part?" Work out sign-ups backwards from the submissions you need. If you have a previous edition, use its submission rate. Then pick channels where people already are: a private link for employees, the university's code for students of a partner university. Set a minimum and a date to decide whether to postpone. You can publish the challenge to the MARA student community, growing with partner universities, or keep it closed: reserved for a university's students, who sign in with their university email, or for whoever receives the private link. A public challenge is visible to the MARA student community, on top of your own channels.

"Who owns the ideas?" Ownership of the work is set in the challenge rules, which participants see before they join. Write it down clearly before sign-ups open and have an adviser check the wording. In an internal hackathon, employment contracts and company policies also apply. Participants keep their certificate and their MARA portfolio. The usual options are in the rules template.

"Is it legal to use a challenge for hiring?" On MARA your people evaluate, against criteria fixed before publishing and the same for everyone. MARA gives no scores, does not rank anyone and does not recommend who to pick. Your privacy notice, legal basis and the AI Act obligations for anyone using AI in hiring need checking with an adviser. The guide on the EU AI Act and hiring sets out the framework.

One metric per goal, chosen before you start:

• Hiring: people interviewed and hired, hours spent compared with today's process. On MARA your people set the statuses in the candidates list, and you can export it to Excel.
• Internal hackathon: proposals that have an owner and resources on the decision date.
• Business game or university: submissions per course or university, and people you contact afterwards.

Set the decision date too. At the awards, name an owner for every idea that moves forward and pick the review date, with three possible outcomes: go, revise or stop. What to do after the awards is in the guide to after the hackathon.

• The challenge draft, written for free in MARA's builder.
• A cover email. There are four ready-to-send emails: HR to leadership, manager to HR, company to a university's career services office, organizer to colleagues who will judge.
• A public case. H-FARM's H-ACK "Robots in Action", a 24-hour hackathon held on 11 and 12 April 2026, ran end to end on MARA: 157 participants, 30 teams, 6 judges (source: H-FARM College article). Read the case.

To see how the platform works, go back to the home page.

• H-FARM College, "Beyond the CV: MARA, the platform born from the challenges of H-FARM College" (H-ACK figures). college.h-farm.com