Chi Hack Night | 2024-2025 Goals

Published on Aug 22, 2024 by Sean Watland

On June 1st, 2024, the Board of Directors held our second 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. Expand the broader awareness of Chi Hack Night
  3. How might we use this broader awareness to bring in more financial support for 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.

2024-2025 OKRs

from 7/1/24 - 6/30/25

Objective 1 - Run the event

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

  • KR 1 - 80% of events have details published to web & Eventbrite at least 2 weeks in advance
  • KR 2 - Book at least 3 presentations from each of the following groups: government, journalism, academia, nonprofit, and advocacy
  • KR 3 - Ensure that the composition of presenters is at least 60% persons underrepresented in tech, including BIPOC, women and gender minorities

Objective 2 - Grow the value of Membership & Volunteering

  • KR 1 - More than 10% of volunteer roles available (non-board required) are filled by non-board attendees
  • KR 2 - Grow the total number of members by 10%
  • KR 3 - Have 4 non Hack Night events (1 member meeting and 3 social events)

Objective 3 - Increase Chi Hack Night Awareness to drive Engagement and Support

  • KR 1 - Increase Net Monthly LinkedIn Followers Gained by 33%
  • KR 2 - Increase Eventbrite RSVPs by 12%
  • KR 3 - Increase All Attendance by 20%

Wrapping Up our 2023-2024 OKRs

Before signing off for this post, we also wanted to report out on how we did on our previous year’s OKRs. I am quite proud of the work our Board & other volunteers did for Chi Hack Night this year. It’s truly a team effort and none of this could have been possible without all of us.

As for our OKRs, we did a bang up job making some serious strides this year! In short, we achieved 6 KRs, nearly achieved 2 KRs, and missed on only 1 KR.

If you’re curious to learn more, below is a breakdown of how we did for our previous year’s OKRs.

Objective 1 - Run the event

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

ACHIEVED Key Result 1.1: Create a biannual survey for Chi Hack Night community asking people about belonging / welcomingness of events & quality and representativeness of presenters

ACHIEVED Key Result 1.2: Book at least three presentations from each of the following groups: government, journalism, academia, nonprofit, and advocacy

ACHIEVED Key Result 1.3: 65% or higher response rate from presenters on our demographic survey

Objective 2 - Sustain the event

Build & maintain a sustainable infrastructure for weekly operations engaging volunteers and expanding our organization’s capacity

MISSED Key Result 2.1: 20% of volunteer roles available are filled by members (either current or future members)

ACHIEVED Key Result 2.2: Have 4 non Hack Night Meetings (1 member meeting and 3 social events)

ACHIEVED Key Result 2.3: 70% of members are satisfied with our membership requirements

Objective 3 - Promote the event

Promote and share Chi Hack Night presentations, events, and projects to a wider audience

JUST MISSED Key Result 3.1: Grow number of monthly sessions on our website year over year by 5%

JUST MISSED Key Result 3.2: Grow hours watched on YouTube by 5%

ACHIEVED Key Result 3.3: 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.

About the author

Sean Watland

Sean Watland
Chi Hack Night President