Compete in the 2021 Hackapalooza and your solution could propel the company into the future!
Be sure to sign up by June 1st in order to receive your hackathon tee-shirt and sticker!
As DriveTime, Bridgecrest, and SilverRock continue to grow and evolve as a company, it’s imperative that we continue to provide a stimulating and engaging environment for our employees, along with innovating to drive revenue and improve customer experience. This is exponentially more important now that some employees are working from home and staying connected with the home office virtually.
The 2021 Hackapalooza is your opportunity to imagine, build, and implement solutions that will not only change the way we work in our own departments, but how we continue to work together across departments within the new environment we find ourselves in. With 7 challenges in 2 different tracks to choose from that covers everything from virtual working challenges, to website and data improvements, all employees are welcome to partake in our first virtual hackathon!
Teams will be pre-formed to ensure a healthy mix of departments, skill sets and interests across all of the teams. Fasten your seatbelts and start your engines, because your solution may be one of many to cross the finish line and propel us into the future!
Challenges
There are two separate tracks of challenges for the hackathon: Organizational Upgrades and Technology Innovation. Your teams will be pre-formed to ensure cross-departmental collaboration, and you will be able to choose a challenge in either of the tracks based on the challenges that most interested you at registration.
$10K IN PRIZES!
We will have up to $10,000 in prizes to distribute for the hackathon! This will come in the form of cash prizes for placing 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, as well as other opportunities to earn gift cards. Be sure to stay active on the event platform to ensure you land in the winners circle!
Kickoff Webinar
We will have one kickoff webinar to explain the challenges and how the event platform works, and one webinar to explain the technical side of the challenges and data access.
Kickoff Webinar
Link to be provided soon! The webinar will take place on the event platform on June 7th, 1 PM Mountain Time.
Technical Challenges Webinar
Link to be provided soon! The webinar will take place on the event platform.
Date and time to be announced shortly.
Agenda
5/25
5/25-6/1
6/7
6/25
Registration Opens!
Team Formation: Once you are registered, the organizers will begin creating the teams for the hackathon. Your project page will be created for you, and a webinar will take place on June 7 to explain the challenges and the hackathon structure.
The Hackathon Begins! You can now begin working on your projects, watch webinars, and ask the mentors questions as your projects progress.
Hackathon Ends! The judges will review the projects and determine who the winners are.
Resources
After signing up, participants will have access to a SharePoint site that will host all data and resources. You will also have access to mentors for each of the individual challenges. The mentors will be your greatest resource to help you understand the challenges, provide resources, and guide you towards a winning solution!
Contact
Reach out to the BeMyApp team above for any registration, hackathon platform or support questions!
Due to recent events that shall not be named, the ability to work from home has been a perk many employers offer to employees. However, in the age of flexible working locations and hours, hybrid working is the new norm. Not only do DriveTime employees want to work from home, but they also want the ability to work in the office when they want. This has created a world of opportunities for our employees, but how does hybrid working get managed effectively? How can we balance the need for a workspace with the need for flexibility among employees and make sure everyone has a hot seat when they need it?
This challenge requires teams to put themselves into the shoes of managers and employees and think about the needs of both. Your goal is to build a solution focused on employee experience, workplace design and employee engagement by creating an app or tool accessible to all. Now is the time to make your number one asset, your number one priority and finish #1 at the hackathon.
As our organization grows, so does the giant web of interconnected departments.
Maintaining consistency but being adaptable to change is the key to success when growing. So, how do we do it? What puts us in the driver seat of organizational success at DriveTime? Interconnectedness is at the heart of our daily success, but how do we make sure that we are managing teams, documents and communication effectively?
Put your foot on the gas pedal and grab the steering wheel of the organization because we’re going for a ride! Successfully win this challenge and you’ll be sure to see yourself in the Winners Circle!
Sooner or later, retirement is on the horizon for every employee at DriveTime. While you may understand the benefits of investing early and taking advantage of the free money the company matches your retirement contributions, do your colleagues? Perhaps more importantly, did you start investing and preparing early enough, or are you trying to catch up? How can we instill the right mindset into each employee early in their career so no one leaves money on the table and we can all get to financial independence sooner?
This challenge is right for you if you want to build a solution that gamifies financial planning, creates an acknowledgment system, and encourages your colleagues to reach their financial goals. Consider how you can use email, Slack, Teams, company meetings, and/or the company intranet to reach, acknowledge and encourage more people, more often. Plan your way to retirement and stop at the winner’s circle along the way!
Moving car buying to the internet has created unlimited potential, but what brings a potential buyer to DriveTime to start filling out an application and start the buying process only to abandon it half way through? How can we identify based on where these potential buyers are coming from, and actions they take on our website, whether they are likely to buy a car or not? Can we influence them to get across the finish line?
Teams that take on this challenge should be motivated to build a solution that integrates AI or ML into the customer journey by tracking and utilizing information about a potential buyer (think about integrating social logins that pull identifying information), gamifying the buying process (i.e. “What kind of driver are you?” survey at the start of an application or upon visiting the home page) or creating a voice enabled chat-bot to profile a potential buyer and steer them into the right car. If you can do this successfully and increase the rate of buying you are sure to increase your chances of winning 1st place!
When customers are upset, we spend more time, money, and resources making sure we fix the issue to make the customer happy. After all, a happy customer is the best advertisement a company can get. However, not all organizations manage customers the same way, and not all customer complaints are equal. The goal here is to rethink how we manage our customers’ happiness and increase the chances our customers return for their next purchase and refer their friends and family.
Teams that want to improve the overall customer experience and the journey from beginning to end should take on this challenge. After all, we’ve all been a dissatisfied customer at one point or another and the company that handles it right retains our loyalty. Perfect the process to improve DriveTime’s retention of repeat customers and you could be satisfied with a first-place finish!
Marketing at DriveTime has one goal in mind: getting people to buy a vehicle. Consumers see 1000’s of commercials every year on television touting the newest vehicle in the lineup and if they mention the car out loud their computer ads are sure to be bombarded (thanks, Alexa!) and the ads double or triple. Is this level of frequency actually needed in order to land a sale, or is it a waste of ad spend? We want to determine the optimal level of frequency of impressions to maximize our ROI from our Cable TV buy.
For teams that want to understand and design an impression and frequency model where ROI is measured based on a plethora of variables, this challenge is for you. Determine if there is a measurable way to determine when advertising becomes too much and the ROI begins to decrease, and build a model we can use to best dial in our spend amounts and frequencies. Optimize our ad spending and DriveTime could instead be spending its money on you!
Put yourself in this moment: you begin to research and look at cars online through various sites. Suddenly, you see the perfect car. It has the style, color, engine, upholstery, wheels, and capacity you’re looking for, but there’s just one thing; it’s too expensive. Naturally, you begin thinking about alternatives. Something smaller? Something with less power or technology? The problem we face as human beings is that we always seem to want what we can’t have, or in this case, can’t afford. Let’s make vehicle purchasing easier than ever by being able to easily swap out vehicles and compare multiple options at the same time depending on the qualifications the consumer wants to set.
Take on this challenge if you want to create a new and shiny online purchasing experience for consumers while collecting more useful data for sales and marketing teams. Build a vehicle recommendation engine that keeps potential buyers engaged and leads to more applications and purchases being completed. Find a way to bring this idea to life and you could be the one recommended for a photo finish!