Building a robot and creating an amazing team is the overall goal, but you need money and support for your team to succeed. How do you raise the thousands of dollars to cover the cost of being part of FIRST?
There are three main ways to raise the funds:
Grants
Looking for grants:
- Check with your Regional FIRST Robotics Competition Director. Organizations such as NASA and JCPenney give special grants to new FIRST teams. Often the Regional FRC Director will receive funding and will be able to give that funding to teams from their area who apply.
- Do an internet search. Look online for grants in your area or nationwide. When looking for grants, be sure to see whether you meet their giving criteria.
Tips:
- Read carefully. Be sure you fully understand what the grant is asking for before you start compiling information.
- Look at the requirements for the grants well ahead of the deadlines. Some grants require business plans or long proposals, so make sure you have the time and resources to complete the application.
- Meet deadlines! All grants have deadlines for submission. Make sure you allow yourself enough time to submit the application before the deadline.
- Follow all instructions. Whether the application requires a 3-page proposal or 250-word summary, make sure you follow the instructions. In some cases, if you do not follow them, your grant will be denied.
- Be reasonable. Don’t apply for a $50,000 grant for robot parts that cost much less. Make sure it is clear to you (and the funders) where you will use the money. They will not fund your initiative if your team doesn’t know what it’s for or if what you’re asking for doesn’t seem reasonable.
You can find grants on the USFIRST.org website. It’s updated periodically for big grants, but look on your regional website for information tailored to your area.
How To Write a Grant Proposal: Watch this two-minute video that shows how to write a successful grant proposal.
Sponsorship
Sponsorship is often the best way to get the funds to support your robotics team. Companies from your local area actually set aside money to give to charities and to the community. FIRST is a program that is proven to develop quality students, and companies may sponsor teams to help develop and attract future employees.
How to Write a Corporate Sponsorship Proposal: Watch this five-minute video on how to successfully write a sponsorship proposal.
Approaching companies can be one of the most confusing processes on the business side of newer FIRST teams because there is not only way to do it. Create your own system using some very simple rules.
- Always use a personal contact. It is much harder to get in contact with the right person by cold calling, emailing, or mailing the general company number. Ask your team’s mentors and parents for possible contacts.
- Write a letter of general inquiry. This letter informs potential sponsors about the benefits that your team provides to the local community as well as the benefits that the company would see if they support you. Basically, this letter encourages companies to fund your team by showing them the “return” they’ll have by investing in your team.
- Keep your materials consistent. To be successful in your fundraising adventures, make sure you have a consistent message. What is your team’s purpose? Why do you need this money? Having a template letter that can be customized to the specific company makes the process easier and ensures that all materials companies get are well-made and consistent.
- Emphasize what sponsors will receive if donating to your team. For example, mention the fact that all your sponsors will be announced at competitions or that you’ll thank them by putting their logo in your pit and on your robot.
- Make sure to continually tell them what impact they are having on your team. Keep them updated! Sponsors want to know how their money is being used and what the team is up to.
- Look for in-kind donations as well as monetary donations. Often, these can be just as useful for your team. For example, ask a plastic manufacturer for plastic products or ask a clothing store for uniforms! FIRST Team #3504 asked American Eagle to sponsor our uniforms and they generously did so. Being as we have 60 girls on our team, this donation saves us thousands of dollars.
Fundraisers
Fundraiser are a great way to raise money for your team. But for fundraisers, the more money you aim to raise, the more intense they can get. However, your team can get creative with fun and effective fundraisers that involve your team’s school(s) and local community.
Drive One 4 UR School.
A great example of a creative fundraiser is one run by SWAT, FIRST Team #771 from St. Mildred’s-Lightbourn School, called Drive One 4 UR School.
Drive One 4 UR School is a fundraising opportunity already run by Ford to raise money for school activities. FIRST Team #771 contacted their local Ford dealer directly, but you can also go through Ford Corporate instead to be matched with a dealer.
Once FIRST Team #771 settled on a date, they began advertising to their school, families, and local community. They chose this fundraiser because it is unique – it has zero setup cost and no cost for the people participating in the fundraiser.
For each household that sends a driver to test drive a new Ford vehicle, Ford donates $20 to your team up to a maximum of $6000. It is difficult to reach the maximum in a day, so be satisfied if you team raises more than $1000 – which FIRST Team #771 has done both times they ran this fundraiser. For more information, check out Ford’s site.
To publicize the event, use your school newspaper and signage. If you come from multiple schools, all the better! FIRST Team #771 put a notice in their community newspaper, handed out flyers to neighbors in the area, and sent flyers home with their team members to invite family and friends.
On the day of the event, FIRST Team #771 also ran a car wash that was great fun for the team. They asked for donations and raised another $500. In addition, FIRST Team #771 sold refreshments at a bake sale that netted another $350. They also hosted fun, free activities such as “Drive the Robot”, increasing the number of people they catered to.
All in all, this one day fundraiser brought in about $2000 for FIRST Team #771. This fundraiser is available through Ford anywhere in the country, so consider this fundraising idea for your own team.
Annual Spaghetti Dinner and Dessert Auction
Skunkwork Robotics, FIRST Team #1983, hosts an Annual Spaghetti Dinner and Dessert Auction as their primary fundraiser – and they’ve raised over $10,000 in a single day from this one event.
Hold a spaghetti dinner and dessert auction. Invite the whole school, other robotics teams, extended families and friends. Ask local restaurants to cater the dinner with parent help or have your parents prepare it. Ask parents, teachers, students to donate desserts. Ask local businesses to donate desserts.
Sell dinner tickets, serve dinner buffet-style for a little above cost, collect donations, and auction the desserts. Encourage kids to pool pocket change and buy a cake or plate of cookies for 25, 30, 50, or $100. Only sell about 30 to 40 desserts as it takes 2 to 4 minutes to auction each and you are limited to about two hours for the auction. Consider adding a silent auction similar to a PSA before the dessert auction.
Again, get donations from the community and set them up on tables. Bidders write their bidder numbers down on bid sheets with pre-defined bid prices. When the table closes at a predetermined time, the bidder with the highest bid wins the items. Items can include toys, tools, services, trips, just about anything.
This fundraiser can be a great money-maker for new and old FRC teams alike, and it’s a one-time deal. This past year, FIRST Team #1983 gathered the participation and support of over 200 diners with this one event. These key documents will get you on your way to setting up this event for your own team:
- Auctioneer Meeting. Key meeting for an auction, need to coordinate bid spotters, receipt runners, and dessert handlers.
- Example Dessert List. Participants buy for their whole table. The number of desserts is limited so there is some urgency. They are at a fund raiser for their own family. Tables often pool their money and pay up to $200 for one dessert, often more. It can be very fun. Several of the desserts are from local businesses. They are surprisingly supportive and give us elaborate desserts.
- Dinner Flyer. This flyer was posted around school and sent to local businesses, newspapers, supporting businesses, and other FRC teams.
- Parent Planning. Outlines subteams and event timeline.
FIRST’s Fundraiser: Green Lights.
Last year, the FIRST organization released a FIRST-wide fundraising opportunity for both experienced and new teams. Their idea? Sell green lightbulbs – lightbulbs that would outlast the normal ones and could also raise money for the FIRST teams that sold the product. Not only that, butFIRST was also able to get sponsors on board to partially subsidize the original cost of the fundraiser.
This fundraiser not only helps your team raise the funds to build and compete with a robot, but also helps save the world! Click here for more specific information on how your team can participate in this fundraiser.
Media
Media is often one of the most important parts of the team because it directly relates to how well you do in competition, how you present yourself to your sponsors, community, and fans, and how you recruit new members to your team.
Below are some quick links that give more details about how to succeed with Media.
Quick Links:
World Wide Web
Presentations
Team Image
How To: Non-Tech
World Wide Web
In order for your team to get recognition, support, or new recruits, you need to utilize the internet to get the word out there!
Website:
It is extremely easy to make a website now, thanks to blog/website combination sites such as WordPress and Blogspot. For a rookie team, these template sites often work best, as they are quick and easy to set up as well as simple to maintain. Creating and coding a team website, while a worthwhile endeavor, can take up valuable time for rookies.
Website Tips:
- Make it visually interesting. Use moving elements! Look for widgets that can display videos, photo slideshows, countdowns to important events, and more.
- Keep your website with the theme of your team, using your team colors. You want to keep all of your online publications in the same format so that you start to create a consistent image for your team.
- Include photos of your team. Your followers, fans, and sponsors will want to see updated photos of your team, from working on the robot to doing outreach events. Remember, a picture really is worth a thousand words!
- Update your website regularly. This shows your followers, other teams, and judges that your team is putting effort into keeping everyone up to date.
- Read the FIRST Website Award criteria. Even if you’re not planning on submitting for the website award, you should still follow the requirements when creating your website.
Social Media:
Social Media is crucial to the development of new robotics teams. Social media is a powerful way to recruit new members to your team. In addition, it keeps everyone updated on recent details.
Social Networking Websites:
- Instagram. Making a Facebook Fan page is one of the most simple yet effective ways of communicating with team members, fans, and even sponsors. Facebook allows for you to quickly update people on the current status of your team and share media from your website and other social media sites.
- Twitter. Although this is a fairly new site, it allows you to specifically target the people you want to get information to by categorizing them into groups – team members, fans, sponsors – and sending posts to those certain groups.
Video and Content Communities:
- YouTube. Videos communicate especially well with sponsors and fans because they allow them to connect with your team on a more powerful visual basis.
- Dailymotion. You can use this site to take pictures of your robot as it gets built. This allows your fans and sponsors to see the progression of your robot during the Build Season. This gives you the capability to go back and make a stop-motion video of your robot building itself! It’s a fun and exciting way to document the process.
Presentations
Your team will need to become comfortable with creating and giving presentations, as it is an essential skill for sustaining FIRST Robotics Competition teams. FRC teams give presentations for a varying list of reasons, but the most common include presenting for sponsors, giving speeches to judges at competitions, and creating workshops for local FIRST gatherings.
Four Keys to Your Success:
- Consider your audience. You should tailor your presentation so that it is most effective towards your target audience. Know what your audience is looking for – are they looking for statistics? Do they want to know about the impact your team has had on your local community? Knowing your audience will allow you to use specific information to best make your intended points.
- Know your goal. Why are you giving this presentation? Keep your agenda clear throughout your presentation and bring the overall point home in your conclusion so that your audience remembers your presentation for the reason you want them to remember it.
- Plan your time and organize your thoughts. Be effective with every moment you are allotted for your presentation. You’ll come off as more professional, and it will help you keep your presentation on track with proving your main point.
- Practice, practice, practice! Nothing else helps your presentation more.
Super Structure: Just like your FRC robot, your presentation needs a well-organized structure to be successful. Click here for a good basic outline to get you on the right track to a great presentation, created by FIRST Team 3504.
In addition, these sites (one with pointers for creating great slides, the other about how to give a powerful presentation) will get you on the right track for success in your next presentation.
Also, make sure to look at example FIRST presentations to start thinking about how to tailor your presentation to the FRC competition. Go on the internet and search for presentations about similar subjects to get a good idea of where you should be heading with your own presentation.
Team Image
Creating a strong and cohesive team image is actually one of the most important tasks a rookie team faces- you’ll likely stick with the same image for many years to come!
First, think of what you want to represent in your team. As an all-girls team, The Girls of Steel decided we wanted a strong, female centered image. We brainstormed ideas, allowing the entire team to contribute, and settled on Rosie the Riveter. Rosie the Riveter was already an iconic image and it represents the purpose of our team in a visually interesting way.
We knew that we didn’t want to just use Rosie by herself, so we decided to add robotics into the image by photoshopping in the robot parts. We used a basic version of Adobe Photoshop C.53 to layer the images and make everything look normal in proportion to the rest of Rosie.
When creating your own team image, follow these simple tips:
- Message. Make sure you brainstorm images that represent what your team is all about.
- Catchiness. When narrowing down your ideas to a central image, make sure that your image is unique and eye-catching so that people will remember your team.
- Software. After you decide on an idea, make sure to use quality software to create your image so that it will stay crisp when you blow up the image to make posters or pins.
Do you have questions about creating a team image that we didn’t answer here? Ask us!
How To: Non-Tech
Brilliant Buttons:
First, come up with an idea for your button. Often, teams use their logos as their buttons. If you’re from a particular school or organization, piggy-back off of that logo or mascot.
This process is very individual to each FIRST team, but there are some general rules to follow – include your team’s name, your team’s number, your logo/design, and either FIRST’s logo or the special “FIRST” font (both available here).
Terrific T-Shirts:
Having t-shirts for your team is a great way to cohesively make your team uniform, while also adding a little personality to your team’s look.
Creating t-shirts for your team follows two simple steps: find a vendor to create the shirts and design the shirts. Before you start the designing process, make sure you have a vendor lined up to do the printing that offers a price that your team can afford. If you can’t afford the price, you can ask the vendor for a in-kind donation of the services – many vendors, depending on the size of the order, may be willing to do the service pro-bono, or for a discount.
After you have secured your vendor, move on to designing your t-shirt. Your t-shirt should include three things: your logo, FIRST’s logo, and a catchy phrase (or your tag phrase). Make sure you follow your vendor’s specifications, but use your creative juices here!
Bold Banners:
At competition, many teams have personal banners that they hang in their pits. These banners identify your sponsors (recognizing them for their help) and/or help showcase your team.
Again, the best way to get your banners made is to send them out to a printer. Once you find a printer, make an image that follows their specifications. Be creative, but remember that simplicity is key.
Fantastic Flags
At competitions, many teams also make flags for the announcers to wave when they’re on the competition field. This is just part of the amazing fun that FIRST teams bring to the competition. You can choose to go high-tech with your flag (sending it out to get printed) or just use a piece of fabric and make it yourself. Either way, it allows you to join in on the fun!
