Chi Hack Night | 2023-2024 Goals

Published on Aug 22, 2023 by Sean Watland

On June 3rd, 2023, the Board of Directors held our first in-person board retreat! This retreat served as an excellent opportunity for the 10 Board of Directors to have more focused discussions around what membership means at Chi Hack Night, plan our upcoming OKRs for the year, and enjoy copious amounts of bagels & coffee.

Our retreat was held from 10 am until 3 pm, downtown Chicago at dscout corporate headquarters. (Thank you dscout for graciously hosting us for the day!)

Through our discussions, the board identified three primary goals for the upcoming year:

1. Continuing to run a high quality civic tech event
2. Align our membership requirements with our hybrid event format
3. Expand the broader awareness of Chi Hack Night

For the third year, we’ve used an OKR framework to plan and measure our goals. OKRs (short for Objective & Key Results) help us know:

1. What are our important focus areas - the Objectives
2. How do we know we’ve succeeded - the Key Results

If you are curious to learn more about OKRs and how they work, here’s an article that shares more about how they work.

While you’ll see and hear more about the specifics as we work on these throughout the year, we wanted to share these out now so that our wider community can see what we’re planning to focus on in the coming months.

2023-2024 OKRs

from 7/1/23 - 6/30/24

Objective 1 - Run the event

Produce a live, weekly civic engagement event that meaningfully includes diverse speakers and attendees

• KR 1 - Create a biannual survey for Chi Hack Night community asking people about belonging / welcomingness of events & quality and representativeness of presenters
• KR 2 - Book at least three presentations from each of the following groups: government, journalism, academia, nonprofit, and advocacy
• KR 3 - 65% or higher response rate from presenters on our demographic survey

Objective 2 - Increase Membership Engagement

• KR 1 - 20% of volunteer roles available are filled by members (either current or future members)
• KR 2 - Have 4 non Hack Night Meetings (1 member meeting and 3 social events)
• KR 3 - 70% of members are satisfied with our membership requirements

Objective 3 - Promote the event

• KR 1 - Grow number of monthly sessions on our website year over year by 5%
• KR 2 - Grow hours watched on YouTube by 5%
• KR 3 - Grow LinkedIn followers by 10%

If you have more interest in learning more about how Chi Hack Night operates or would like to help - please reach out to me or any one else on our Board.

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