Resources For Other FIRST Teams:
Below are a few tips for our fellow FIRST teams, the information provided is based upon Anderson Robotics' experiences. We have provided tips for a fundraiser, how to host an event, and the best way to get your school to support your robotics club/team.
T-shirt sales:
Our team has found that designing and selling T shirts is a very profitable fund-raiser capable of raising around $2500 easily. We typically distribute pre-order forms with the available designs and colors. Students sign up for whichever T-shirts they desire. We then order our first batch of shirts for those that have pre-ordered. In this way we minimize the risk of ordering too many or too little, both of which would decrease our profit margin, and have guaranteed buyers at the ready. After the initial sale extra shirts are printed for those students that did not initially purchase one.
An example of our order forms can be seen below:
Hosting Events:
Hosting local events is an extremely important part of the FIRST Robotics Competition. While it would seem like s simple task, there are a multitude of things to take into consideration. Click the link below to see a checklist that we came up with for our most recent event. We hope that it will aide others in the planning of an event.
School Buy-In:
Because of our teams involvement in the community, and the school, we had the leverage to lobby for a robotics class to be integrated into the school curriculum. Typically the best approach would be to have either one of your science teachers or your club sponsor approach the principal of your school and request to have said class integrated into the curriculum. Your level of success is determined greatly by the administrations eagerness to integrate engineering into the curriculum. If at first you are turned down the continuation of FIRST participation and media coverage can work as leverage in the future.