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Partnerships

One of the first things you should look for in promoting CodeDay is related organizations. As with sponsors, you should create a list of these leads in your event plan to help you track who's been contacted, and who still needs to be.

As you're creating your list, make sure to include:

  • Teachers (try to avoid going through districts, which can be slow)
  • Principals
  • Charter schools
  • Girl Scouts/Boy Scouts
  • School Clubs
    • Robotics Clubs
    • Math Clubs
    • Science Olympiad Club
    • Programming/Computer/Tech Club
    • FIRST Robotics
    • VEX Robotics
  • YMCA
  • Boys and Girls Club
  • PTA/PSTA
  • Libraries (school and public)
  • Science Centers
  • Museums
  • Other CS Groups
    • Black Girls Code
    • Girls Who Code
    • Coder Dojo
    • HackClub
    • Women in Tech Groups
  • University Outreach Departments
  • University Computer Science Departments
  • For-Profit Coding Academies and Summer Camps
  • Tech Meetups (check Meetup.com)
  • Facebook Groups

Contacting Partners

You should contact all the organizations on your list to tell them a bit about CodeDay, and ask them about a partnership. For schools and clubs, asking for promotion is likely enough, but for related organizations you can offer some sort of cross-promotion where we list them on our website, have them speak at the kickoff, and send out an email to our participants after the event.

Here are some sample emails you can customize. (You can also attach our For Schools Flyer.)

Sample Email for High School CS Teacher

Hi (name),

I'm helping to organize a coding event for students in (city); do you think any of your students might be interested?

The event, CodeDay, is a 24-hour event where students have the opportunity to make games or apps of their own design, while learning more about coding. It's aimed at students who know a little bit about how to code, but aren't yet excited enough to work on projects outside of class.

CodeDay is being held on (date). I found your name when searching for teachers whose students might benefit from something like this.

Do you think your students might be interested? I can send over some flyers!

Thanks so much!

Sample Email for High School Non-CS Teacher

Hi (name),

I'm helping to organize an event for students interested in making games or apps in (city); do you think any of your students might be interested?

The event, CodeDay, is a 24-hour event where students have the opportunity to make games or apps of their own design. Obviously from the name, CodeDay is attended by coders, but we've found that students are often interested in making art, music, etc. for the games and apps. It's a lot of fun.

CodeDay is being held on (date). I found your name when searching for teachers whose students might benefit from something like this.

Do you think your students might be interested? I can send over some flyers!

Thanks so much!

Sample Email for College CS Professor

Hi (name),

My name is (name), and I'm a member of a non-profit working hard to get college students excited about coding.

We run something called CodeDay: a 24-hour event where students have the opportunity to make games or apps of their own design, while learning more about coding. It's aimed at students who know how to code, but aren't very involved in the tech community, or working on projects of their own design.

We just announced that we're running CodeDay on (date). I was looking for teachers whose students might benefit from this, and came across your name.

Would you be interested in promoting this to your students? I can send over some flyers :)

Thanks so much!

Promotion Codes

Clear provides the ability to generate promotion codes for your event, which are extremely useful in figuring out which partners are actually promoting the event, and who you should follow up with.

Here's how it works. For each school which agrees to promote, visit Clear, click on your event, and then Promotion Codes. Select "Tracking the source of registrations" for the Purpose, then select a code which seems relevant, which should be entirely uppercase with no spaces. For example, I'd probably choose "GHS" for Garfield High School.

Once you create the code, you can give it to the school. The Promotions page of Clear will then show you the number of students who sign up with that promotion code. Schools with no signups may need more nagging about promotion.

Scholarships

You can also generate indivdiual scholarship codes on the same page, for students who contact you because they aren't able to afford the ticket cost. Feel free to create these as needed, there's no limit on the number of scholarship codes you can give out each event.

If an entire school or club isn't able to afford the cost, you can also generate a multiple-use scholarship code by selecting "Create your own" for the Purpose, and setting the Discount % to 100. (Leave Code blank to generate one randomly.) Give this code to the teacher to distribute.

Flyers

When you create a promotion code, Clear will also automatically generate PDFs with the promo code and city-specific information which you can attach in emails or print out and hang up around town.