In the past, we have hosted Product Showcases in-person on campus. The majority of attendees would be Hack4Impact members, but a few members from our community would come as well. For the past two semesters, we have held virtual internal Product Showcases, but looking toward this Product Showcase, we can try to reimagine a virtual Product Showcase open to the public — similar to how it was in the past.
When we think about the value that Hack4Impact members create over the course of a semester/year for nonprofits — be it through creating an internal tool, public-facing web app, or letting them explore an idea they could not pursue otherwise — we frequently lose sight of our mission. The public format will let us showcase some of the best and meaningful parts of our organization and to invite the public (e.g. family, friends, nonprofit, other H4I chapters) to see what our organization is all about. Additionally, this is a great opportunity to involve your product's actual users and nonprofit point of contact.
Since our Product Showcase will be public, we also want to be especially cognizant of our messaging and way we carry ourselves.
With every member being spread apart in different places, we have the opportunity to experiment with other mediums! Coordinating a 7-9 person screen-shared presentation over Zoom may cause delays if a team member has technical issues or has laggy internet and lose the interest of viewers with a strictly static presentation formatting.
Based on the overall positive feedback from the past year, each team will be pitching their product in pre-recorded video format.
Having videos is a great way for us to:
Showcasing our products through video will allow each team to intentionally craft how they tell their project's story. For each team, this will help build the skill of filtering down about 400 hours of work down to about 8-10 minutes. To do this successfully, each team must decide how to succinctly describe the problem they are tackling, how their product addresses the problem, the main features of the solution, and desired impact.
Product Showcase will be held publicly on Zoom. Team leads will submit their team's video in this video folder by Saturday, 5/1 @11:59pm.
Longer presentations lose the focus of the audience. While your team has probably done a lot more cool things than what can be described in the short time frame, going into the weeds will make it harder for viewers to understand which details are more important, which ultimately means no one will gain too much out of the videos.
We would also like to give members time to ask questions. These questions can help deepen each viewer's understanding of the project if something was unclear in the video and offer the team presenting new perspectives on their own work.
Concisely describing your project, while difficult, will also help you get to the core of what problem your partner is facing and how you we go about solving it.
We love memes in general and even in our presentations. However, don't drown your video in memes that do not add value or do not help audience understand the purpose of your team's product. For example, the underlying "story" of your presentation should be about your nonprofit, problem, solution, and implementation - not memes. With that being said, do not be afraid to incorporate your team's personality and creativity. Overall, aim to be intentional with every second in the video and utilize memes/humor as a way to enhance the storytelling rather than distract.