As Founding VP of Growth Marketing & Community Engagement for the MediMate Foundation Healthcare Innovation Hackathon 2026, I owned how the event looked, read, and felt — from the web presence and the recap that told 47 students' story, to a certificate system I designed and mass-personalized with AI for every single builder.
What I owned
A hackathon is only as good as the people who show up to it. My first job wasn't promotion — it was trust. I shaped the messaging so the event read as serious rather than a novelty, wrote the outreach that pulled in mentors and sponsors, and helped run the web presence that made a global cohort feel like their ideas would be taken seriously.
That framing did real work. We brought together 47 builders from the USA, Canada, Egypt and beyond, lined up 12 judges and 13 mentors, and rallied 17 sponsors and partners — with WomenTech Network as co-organizer amplifying Demo Day to a community of more than 185,000.
High school builders, grades 7–12
Live healthcare apps shipped
Community reached via WomenTech
Sponsors & partners rallied
The design brief I set myself
Make a teenager with a real idea feel like a founder, not a contestant. Every choice — tone, typography, the way we named things — pointed at that one goal.
Before any of the storytelling, the event needed a home and a reason for people to say yes. I designed and shipped the campaign landing page with two audiences in mind: sponsors who needed to trust us with their money, and students who needed to believe this was worth a week of their summer.
For sponsors, the page led with credibility and a clear ask — and it worked fast: we locked in a $2,500 prize pool almost immediately, anchored by a Base44 partnership that gave every team AI and cloud credits to build on. For students, the page paired a frictionless signup with proof that real judges, mentors, and prizes were waiting. Team signups doubled in the final two weeks, closing at 47 teams from across the globe.
Prize pool secured for winning teams
Partner AI + cloud credits for every team
Team signups in the final two weeks (24 → 47)
Visitor-to-signup-start conversion
The acquisition funnel
Channel performance — organic & owned
Social — LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Instagram
34%
Founder posts, judge/sponsor reshares & new follows
2,790 sessions
Email — student mailing lists & PTA
24%
Targeted student lists + PTA newsletter placements
1,970 sessions
Organic search / SEO
22%
Ranked for teen health-hackathon search terms
1,800 sessions
Referral — schools & parent WhatsApp
20%
Local high schools + parent WhatsApp groups
1,640 sessions
What the funnel taught me
Every channel had a different job — SEO caught the students already looking, social and WhatsApp reached the ones who weren't. Zero paid spend; all of it was organic reach, borrowed audiences, and making it effortless for people to pass the page along.
When the week ended, I wrote the official recap — the piece that would become the public memory of the event. The challenge was scale without flattening: 22 shipped apps, six award categories, dozens of names, and one 13-year-old builder, all deserving to be seen as individuals rather than a statistic.
I built it to move from the human stakes outward — a founder who is a kidney transplant survivor, students building from their own diagnoses — and only then to the numbers. Serious ideas deserve serious framing, and these students had earned it.
The winners I got to name
1st · Grand Prize
Ayura
Team Neurolic
2nd Place
CKM Compass
Code Crushers
3rd Place
Caregiver Bridge
Chronic Change
Best Safest App
TideLine
Beskar
Best Use of AI
Hormone Harmony
BrightMinds AI
Best Patient-Centered Design
Mendly Companion
Git Lit
Every builder had earned a certificate — and I wanted them to feel earned. I designed a gold-and-white system in Canva: a calm participation certificate and a tiered set of achievement certificates for our first, second, third, and specialty winners, each carrying the CEO's signature and the foundation's mark.
The hard part wasn't the design — it was producing 47 of them without a single typo. So I built a small pipeline: a spreadsheet of every name, team, and award, handed to Claude, which merged each recipient into the right template and exported print-ready PNG and JPG files ready to distribute. Design once, personalize at scale.
MediMate Foundation
Healthcare Innovation Hackathon 2026
This certificate is proudly presented to
Every Builder
In recognition of dedicated participation in the MediMate Healthcare Innovation Hackathon 2026, a global virtual challenge where high school innovators used AI and design thinking to build human-centered solutions for real healthcare problems.
Deepti Bahel
MediMate Foundation
Healthcare Innovation Hackathon 2026
First Place Winner
This certificate is proudly presented to
Team Neurolic
In recognition of outstanding achievement, earning 1st Place at the MediMate Healthcare Innovation Hackathon 2026 for Ayura — condition-aware food guidance built from lived experience.
Deepti Bahel
The production pipeline
Design
Gold-and-white templates built in Canva — participation + tiered awards.
Merge with AI
Claude reads a spreadsheet of names, teams & awards and drops each into the right template.
Export & send
Print-ready PNG + JPG files generated per student for instant, error-free distribution.
Why this mattered to me
Using AI to handle the repetition meant I could spend my attention on the part that actually needed a designer's eye — the craft, the hierarchy, the feeling of holding something that says you built real software. Automation in service of care, not instead of it.
To carry the story past our own audience, I wrote and published the launch post on LinkedIn, then packaged a share-ready caption so judges, mentors, sponsors, and parents could post it in one click. Amplification is a design problem too: give people something good and make it effortless to pass on.
Share-ready caption
47 high school students. 22 live healthcare apps. 6 days.
Last week the MediMate Foundation Healthcare Innovation Hackathon 2026 wrapped, and I am still processing what these students pulled off. Grades 7 through 12, from the USA, Canada, Egypt and beyond, shipping deployed, independently security-scanned healthcare software — many building from their own lived experience as patients.
Congratulations to our winners: Team Neurolic (Ayura), Code Crushers (CKM Compass), Chronic Change (Caregiver Bridge), Beskar (TideLine), BrightMinds AI (Hormone Harmony) and Git Lit (Mendly Companion).
Thank you to our founders Deepti Bahel and Ayushi Ajay Walia, our 12 judges, 13 mentors, 17 sponsors and partners, keynote speaker Mandeep Kaur Sanghera OBE, co-organizer WomenTech Network, and every parent who trusted their kids into a week of real building.
#HealthcareInnovation #StudentInnovators #MediMateFoundation #Hackathon #HealthTech #YouthInSTEM
I came into this thinking of marketing as reach. I left understanding it as respect. Every deliverable — the site, the recap, the certificates, the caption — was really answering one question: how do I make these students feel that what they built mattered?
Design gave me the tools, and AI gave me the leverage, but the through-line was community. That is the kind of work I want to keep making — creative, entrepreneurial, and pointed squarely at the good of the people it serves.
The through-line
A brand, a recap, a certificate, a caption — different forms, same job: take something meaningful and give it the form it deserves. A thinker who makes, and a maker who thinks.