How Hack Club Powers Global Youth STEM Programs with Zite

Hack Club (registered as the Hack Foundation) promotes STEM education for high schoolers worldwide. Through student-led coding clubs in schools and large-scale in-person events — hackathons, hardware jams, and design challenges — Hack Club gives young people a launchpad into engineering, programming, and creative technology. Recent events include a hackathon at AMD headquarters in San Jose, a murder-mystery-themed hackathon in Vienna, and a hackathon held on a boat in Boston Harbor.

Running nearly 200 programs across dozens of countries requires collecting data from tens of thousands of participants: event signups, project submissions, and more. Hack Club needed a forms and data-collection platform that was simple enough for any staff member to pick up instantly, yet flexible enough to handle complex conditional logic, custom branding, and deep integrations with their Airtable-based operations stack. Off-the-shelf tools like Google Forms and native Airtable forms fell short on customization, and building bespoke solutions for every use case wasn't sustainable.

Hack Club adopted Fillout by Zite as their sole forms platform, replacing fragmented workflows that would have otherwise required costly custom development. The decision came down to three things: flexibility, simplicity, and native integration with other platforms they use.

• Plug-and-play simplicity. Any staff member — technical or not — can spin up a new form in minutes. Zite's low learning curve means no training is required. As Wilkin puts it: “It's plug and play. People don't need training on how to use it.”
• Deep Airtable integration. Hack Club runs on Airtable's enterprise plan. Zite's ability to read, create, and update Airtable records by record ID gives them a seamless two-way data pipeline between their forms and their operations database.
• Total brand control. Custom domains, theming, and white-labeling let every form feel like a native part of Hack Club's own platform rather than a third-party tool.
• Powerful conditional logic. Complex branching, conditional field visibility, and URL parameter handling support advanced workflows like age-verified submissions and one-time authentication tokens.

Zite is deeply embedded across Hack Club's operations. Every program, event, and initiative routes through the platform in some capacity.

• Event management. Participant signups, waiver collection, progress check-ins, and post-event surveys all run through Zite. For their “Shipwrecked” hackathon on Boston Harbor alone, approximately 150 attendees and 1,400 project submissions were managed entirely through Zite forms.
• E-commerce and rewards. For “Arcade,” a summer program run in partnership with GitHub, Hack Club used Zite's conditional logic to build a full e-commerce-style shop where teens converted coding hours into redeemable prizes. Over 6,000 projects were submitted through the platform during a subsequent program called “High Seas.”
• Custom authentication proxy. Hack Club built a platform called “Submit” that proxies form access through their in-house authentication system (Hack Club Auth). A one-time token is passed into Zite as a hidden URL parameter, verified against Airtable, and used to enforce age verification — all without requiring program authors to do anything beyond pasting a form link.
• International payments. Before adopting Wise's enterprise API, Hack Club assembled a complex Zite form covering every international payment option — a single form that took six hours to build and replaced an entirely manual process.
• Templates for scale. Using Zite's template cloning feature, staff replicate pre-configured forms with standard fields and Airtable connections, then customize as needed. This standardizes data collection across 188 programs while preserving flexibility.

After an internal review, Hack Club upgraded from Zite's Plus plan to Enterprise. The move was driven primarily by the need for tighter access controls.

Today, 127 active users operate across multiple Zite workspaces, each scoped to a specific program or event. Role-based access control (RBAC) ensures that sensitive data — including PII from minors — is only visible to authorized team members. Enforced two-factor authentication adds another layer of protection.

Custom domains have been a standout Enterprise feature. By white-labeling forms on Hack Club's own domain, every touchpoint feels natively part of their platform. Wilkin describes it as “amazing — it makes forms feel natively part of our platform.”

• 180,000+ teens have interacted with Hack Club programs through Zite forms
• 188 programs tracked and managed on the platform
• 24,000+ projects submitted across all events
• 127 enterprise users actively building and managing forms
• 0 alternatives needed — “Zite is literally the only solution we have and we need.”