HELP!! Need $5000 for registration fee and we dont have any sponsors! [Archive]

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Ryan Foley

15-09-2002, 13:02

Hi
Im from Timberlane Tantrum, team 350 out of Plaistow NH. Last year (2002 season), our sponsor dropped out on us and we didnt compete. The same is about to happen again this year. We dont have any sponsors, and our team is about 15 members. I was wondering if you guys had suggestions on ways we could raise the $5000 by December so we wont be dormant again for the 2003 season. Thanks for all your help

sanddrag

15-09-2002, 13:54

First,
See this thread (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=14260)

Then read this.

For big, corporate soponsors, it's going to take a lot of work. We currently don't have any either. You can write letters to either the local or corporate offices of soem companies near you. You will need to write dozens of letters because most of them will just be ignored. You also need to have a followup phone call 2-3.5 weeks after you send the letter. I can send you a copy of the letter we currently use if you like.

You can also try to fundraise/obtain sponsors on the local level. Have a few people of your team just go in to your local home center and ask to to speak with the manager. If he is busy, arrange another time. When you speak with the manager, have a nice presentation ready with something like a binder to show who your team is, what you do, what you need, and why this place should help. They will probably be able to give you a percentage off all purchases or a gift certificate or possibly a donation.

You can also divide up the back of your team shirts into about 24 business card size rectangles. Sell these as advertising space to all the local businesses for $100-$200 per square. You will need to be able to tell them how many people will be wearing them, how often, and when the shirts will be made.

Another thing you can do is go around to perhaps the same businesses for the back-of-shirt advertising and offer them a plaque (spelling? - sounds like "plack") that has a photo of your team (students, mentors, engineers, robot(s) all included) and a place where it says "A proud supporter of the 2003 Timberlane Tantrum Robotics Team". You can probably get these made for around $30 and sell them for about $150. They can hang it in a public place of their store/restaurant to show people that they have community involvement.

You can also have fundraiser nights at a favorite restaurant nearby. Many restaurants are happy to set up an event for you where you take something like 20% of the sales that night because it's all tax deductable for them. Just be sure to stay away from Baja Fresh (if there's any of those near you) because you'll hardly make a dime.

Car washes can also bring in the bucks. If you can do it in a high traffic area in a place near your school, you are bound to make minimum $200.

Last, if your school has lunch carts or a cafeteria, try to see if members of your team can work in any of those during lunchtime. We get $25 per day for 2 students on one cart for 20 mins. Not bad.

Remember for any outside funding or fundraising, you will most likely need to have your team's or school's tax ID number on hand.

Hope this helps. If I can be of further assistance, let me know.

- sanddrag

evulish

16-09-2002, 00:25

Carwashes bring in the most money as far as small fundraisers go. It is getting a bit late in the season to be having one though, so you had better hurry up :)

Try asking your school if you can sell refreshments at sporting events. I'm sure this brings in loads of money (especially if you get the stuff donated or made). I'm not too into sports (haha...) but I think basketball, football, soccer, cross country, and maybe wrestling is before the deadline. It should add up over time.

Go beg to local places. This is what our team does. Our biggest sponsor is less than $4,000. Ask schools for money. Ask local (read: not huge chain) stores for money... Ask factories. Ask electric companies/cooperatives. Just bug the heck out of the community :) You're sure to get a few thousand dollars worth of pity money.

And presentations really count. Bring an adult :P (I doubt many companies will give checks to kids)

Sell candybars in your school Sell hoagies. Sell dohnuts. Have a collective yardsale :P (They work!) Have a bingo night (we're working on doing this). Five bucks a card...10 games or whatever...split your money in half and give out one half worth of prize money (assuming it will be greater than $5 :D)

Go to local fairs and happenings. Make a donation box. You wouldn't believe how well this works. All profit...well...besides the box :P

And lastly,
DONT SELL FREEZY POPS! Argh. Because sell is one thing they don't do. :D

Mongoose

11-10-2002, 13:41

We tried selling candy last year. It didn't quite work out, and now we have a couple large boxes of lollipops lying in our storage room. We gave them away by the handful one night, but they're still there. I also heard another team got a load of money just from going to a fair and charging $1/minute for people to drive their robot around.

MacZealot

12-10-2002, 00:43

Kristina

12-10-2002, 00:54

how long do you have to raise the money? all of the above ideas are great and if I knew the timeframe, I might be able to contribute more ideas.

And this is purely purely out of curiosity, I'm not recommending it. But can a robotics team or parent get a loan from a bank? I'm a little sleep deprived so random thoughts just come up, so I was just wondering.

Leon Machado IV

12-10-2002, 04:37

TJ has been doing there candy selling for about a month now and we've raised around $3,000 profit. Course are kids are now profesional candy sellers. We've been doing it for like 7 years. We're good.

Todd Derbyshire

12-10-2002, 17:59

Lee what happened to Inspiration FIRST??

Rob Colatutto

12-10-2002, 18:11

Mongoose

18-10-2002, 23:34

To elaborate on the idea even more, you could try the following: If your robot has ball pick-up capability (not everybody has that), you could scatter balls around an arena and have people try and pick as many of them up and put them in a goal in, let's say, 5 minutes (for $5 or so). Then you could give away prizes (stale lollipops!) for picking up certain numbers of balls. And if you don't have pickup capability, I guess you could put together an arm and mount it on the robot or else have the object of the game to be to nudge all the balls in some corner/area of the arena instead of picking them up. Just more ideas.

sanddrag

18-10-2002, 23:42

How much has anyone seriously gotten from a robot demo? Also, where did you do it and what did you charge?

I just don't want to spend a Saturday doing it and then the Sunday fixing it. Won't people go too hard on it?

Mongoose

19-10-2002, 00:40

I said another team did it. Team 492, Titan Robotics from International School (around my area), did it and I think our advisor said they got several thousand from that. I don't exactly know the details, just "$1/minute for driving the robot around".

sanddrag

19-10-2002, 01:26

Oh so you mean over multiple time's they've done this they made thousands. Maybe we ought to give it a try. If we could work in some sort of kill switch to where I can press it if someone is driving it too hard and the robot will shut down....

Or I could just keep my hand real close to the OI power cord and be ready to yank that out to end the fun:D

Andrew

19-10-2002, 12:09

sanddrag wrote:
Oh so you mean over multiple time's they've done this they made thousands. Maybe we ought to give it a try. If we could work in some sort of kill switch to where I can press it if someone is driving it too hard and the robot will shut down....

If you check the Innovation FIRST Operator Interface documentation (I think it is in the "Control System Manual"), you will find a nifty little way to wire a disable switch to the 15 pin Competition Port. You just have to short two pins. A flick of the switch and the motors on the robot are disabled (in other words, it doesn't reset the system or stop the RC from making computations).
Andrew
Team 356

Ryan Foley

19-10-2002, 12:10

we already have a kill switch. If you build yourself a yellow dongle (look in the white papers section on this site you can use the dongle's remote kill switch. We are attaching ours to a compeitiion tether so that way the button is not wher spectators can reach it.
Thanks for all your ideas guys/ girls

Hailfire

19-10-2002, 16:22

Go to Sam's Club or one of those kinds of clubs and get large packages of chips, candy, etc. Then, sell them at your school for about $0.50 or $0.75 a piece. You'll probably make a profit. Not much, but some. Hope that helps.

MattK

19-10-2002, 21:37

Hi-Jack a segway and sell it on ebay. Come to manch-vegas, they are all over the place!

Jon K.

19-10-2002, 23:33

Originally posted by sanddrag
How much has anyone seriously gotten from a robot demo? Also, where did you do it and what did you charge?

RAGE has done two demos for two different Cub Scout troops. We got $100 each time and all we did was talk about the bot and FIRST for a little bit and then drive the robot and let the kids watch and ask questions later. Pretty much the kids were not allowed to touch the robot but they asked some pretty good questions about the parts. So for about 4 hours worth of doing stuff we made $100. And since this year team members that help with fundraising will get there fair share contributed to their traveling costs or whatever, no one is getting a free ride so to speak. Also to MattK, stop talking about hi-jacking segways no one wants it on these boards so stop already. We have had enough of you garbage posts about Segways. No one really cares anymore So STOP!!!!

Elgin Clock

21-10-2002, 12:35

Originally posted by Mongoose
We tried selling candy last year. It didn't quite work out, and now we have a couple large boxes of lollipops lying in our storage room. We gave them away by the handful one night, but they're still there. I also heard another team got a load of money just from going to a fair and charging $1/minute for people to drive their robot around.

Yeah we did that, It was actually $1 for about three minutes. It was mostly little kids (4-9) that came up to drive it but a few adults as well. We need to come up with a kill switch though for next year, or enclose the area around the "robot test drive" area. We had a few people who were hit mostly by accident and the people who were bumped into were good about the situation but there are always the rowdy ones, more than likely the older kids (13-15) who were driving who drove into people for kicks. :mad: Darn Punks!!!! Oh and if you have other compttions you are gong to later in the year, make sure you have time to fixe something if it goes wrong. I, yes I said "I", broke one of our drill motor transmissions during one of these test drives. I'm not allowed to drive the robot anymore!! LOL

Also one of the advisors for the team has basically a candy shop in his closet at school. We sell it all!!! :D

Gadget470

23-10-2002, 22:43

moreso than just a kill switch, have someone nearby the perimeter of your No-Stand-Zone.

247, 469, and one other team did a 2-day demo for the opening of the Detroit Science Center, this was two years ago w/ the big balls.

While a kid, (under 13) was driving around and a member of 469 was tossing the ball to the bot so the kid could 'catch' it, it was in grasp then the kid started moving around with the bot.

It became topheavy over a group of 5-8 year olds who assumed the robot was trying to hand them the ball when in fact it was tipping over on top of them.

Luckily, someone on 469 that was standing near the kids caught the robot saving a catastrophe.

So basically, if you are going to be showing off your bot, and allowing inexperienced drivers of any age, consider worst-case scenario's and prevent them

Katie Reynolds

29-10-2002, 12:09

Originally posted by Hailfire
Go to Sam's Club or one of those kinds of clubs and get large packages of chips, candy, etc. Then, sell them at your school for about $0.50 or $0.75 a piece. You'll probably make a profit. Not much, but some. Hope that helps.

Actually, we do something like that. We help out with the regional FLL tournament and host the state tournament. At each of these events, our team sells concessions. We sell soda, milk, coffee, lemonade, pizza, hot dogs, chips, and cookies. We sell them at a reasonable price ($0.50 for a soda, $0.50 for a bag of chips, etc.) - but we make a really good profit.

We also sell candybars to raise money. We buy them for $0.50/bar and sell them for $1. It actually does raise a fair amount of money.

This past year, we sold giant Pixie Stix at our city's Octoberfest. We bought the candy for $150 (total) ... but by the time we are done selling them, we will have made $800 profit. It's a pretty good deal.

As far as corporate sponsors go, we have two main ones: Plexus Corp and the Appleton Area School District (AASD). The AASD gives us a really nice grant to keep the program going, and Plexus picks up the cost of our spare parts and such. It's a really nice deal. Kimberly Clark also sends a few of their engineers over to help. They donate welding equipment to the school, which we use.

Our team also has a lot of smaller sponsors - but we appreciate them as much as our main sponsors! These "smaller" sponsors donate food, materials and equipment to our team. Without them, we would have problems.

Every year, after Nationals, Our team has a sponsor's banquet. We invite all of the head people who's comapnies sponsor us to the dinner. We recognize them, and hand out plaques with the company's name, the year and a picture of our team at one of the competitions we attended that past season. Many of our sponsors have the plaques hanging in their lobbies, so a lot of people see these!

Our team also does a fair amount of demonstrations around the city. We don't get any money for doing these demos, but we have picked up a few sponsors by doing so. I think our piggest sponsor pick-up is at Octoberfest. Thies year, a guy from Bimba noticed us and said he can give us almost anything (pneumatics-wise) for free! All we have to do is ask. So even though we don't get money *directly* for doing these demos, many times it pays off in the long run! :)

One new thing we are trying this year:

Each team member is responsible for fundraising half of his/her cost to go to a competition. Example: if a competition is going to cost a student $50 to attend, they must raise at least $25 to be able to go. This just encourages fundraising for students.

Does your team pay for students to go to competitions, or do they pay for the costs themselves? If the team pays now, you might want tot hink about making the students pay (or fundraise!) to go. That will cut back a *little* on your team's costs.

I hope this helps!!

- Katie

Jnadke

29-10-2002, 13:46

Last year we tried selling pointsettas but that didn't bring in a whole lot of profit... Don't quote me on that but not very many people sold their share. A lot of people were just too lazy.

One thing we used to do for Boy Scouts was selling wreaths. We used to raise tons of money selling those. If you can find a good wreath company, and go door-to-door (or have your parents bring the forms to work)... you'll sell lots of those for the holiday season. Set up multiple times that people can have theirs delivered (like December 2 and December 20, or something like that). Some people bought 2 wreaths so they can have a fresh one for christmas. Usually we sold them for $12-$20 depending on the size of wreath the customer bought (and how much cost was).

The good thing about this sale, is that you can keep your customer list from previous years. Then, the next year you can call everyone back up and see if they are interested in buying them again. You customers increase every year, and so do your profits!

OneAngryDaisy

29-10-2002, 17:58

Raffles are also a good way to earn money- raffle off something kids really want like a xbox and you'll make a ton

Another really really good way to make money is to host a mini-competition. We're having our third annual "Ramp Riot" this coming saturday.. I know you guys probably can't do this since you don't even have a robot- jus throwing my part in the pot

I've noticed some other teams with about twenty or thirty sponsors- you could go around to every local business and tell tehn you'd put their name on your shirt and the robot, etc

Another idea- if you have a few robots sell one of them.. you could fool someone in paying a few thousand $ for it...

sanddrag

29-10-2002, 21:14

Sell a robot? Never.

We just had a carwash on a cool, partly cloudy day and made $680 - $35 for water. We had about 15 people working. We presold tickets begining 4 days in advance and a car/truck/suv wash was $5. Parents donated soap, towels, sponges, etc. We even got Papa John's to HIGHLY discount some pizza for us for lunch. We're talkin' like 2 bucks for a large.

Very nice.

<edit> And oh yeah, at my school, it is illegal to hold any form of a raffle. So you might want to check on that first.:) </edit>

OneAngryDaisy

29-10-2002, 22:03

illegal? what?- here almost every athletic team or club has a raffle... Is there a specific reason they have been banned at your school?

Brandon Martus

29-10-2002, 22:44

Originally posted by OneAngryDaisy
illegal? what?- here almost every athletic team or club has a raffle... Is there a specific reason they have been banned at your school?

If I remember correctly, when ChiefDelphi raffled off miscellaneous large electronic items (laptop, tv, vcr, dvd, etc) at the CDI's in the past, they had to get a state license to do so. I think.

Katie Reynolds

29-10-2002, 23:20

Yeah, I know we're not allowed to hold a raffle without special permission from someone.

Not too sure on the details though :-\

- Katie

Ricky Q.

30-10-2002, 12:19

Originally posted by Katie Reynolds
Yeah, I know we're not allowed to hold a raffle without special permission from someone.

Not too sure on the details though :-\

- Katie

In Wisconsin at least you have to get a liscence from some state agency and put the Lic. # on all the tickets you sell, we did a PS2 and TV raffle last year and made around $2500.

Different for this year is that our district (OASD) is our biggest sponsor, giving us $6000....Quest has dropped their money support to $2500, and our 3 or 4 other big sponsors give us $1000. We raise the rest with candy bars (lots and lots and lots of candy bars), pizza sales, car wash, bake sale, and just plain out donations. Team members get their regional trips paid for (at least 1, we aren't sure how it will work out with going to 2 regionals this year) and the members that goto nationals usually end up paying about half, and the other half comes from the team.

Shana

06-11-2002, 18:39

Another idea for fundraising would be a silent auction. My team used to do it, we made a coulple thousand last year. What you need to do is send your team members out with general letters asking companies for a donation of their goods or services. You then can make it into either a dinner or dessert buffet, we prefered the last one, and charge people for coming in. It was a great way to make money and fun:) You just have to make sure your team is willing to put in all the work that goes into it.

~SHANA~
P.S. To make it more cost efficent we had the students bring dessert so that we had no out of pocket cost.