Raise participation on a small team
 

I am looking for anyone's input on how to raise membership for my team. We are a small team of about 7 kids (4 of whom will be graduating this year). We once used to be a combined team with 3 schools in the area, but we are now down to one school who knows little about the team. We barely have enough funding or membership to compete, and desperately need new members.

Despite all of our best efforts (driving the robot around the school, attending pep rallies and activity fairs, etc.), we cannot find lowerclassmen students who are interested and have the time to join the team. My school does not care for STEM extracurriculars, and will not even provide us with the necessities (busses, etc.) given to some of the other school activities (e.g. chess club). They would probably take away our room in the basement if they remembered where it was.

I am asking any members of previously small teams who have done something (anything) to gain new members. Hopefully people have good ideas because I don't know if we will be able to compete next year with 3 members and hardly enough funding. Thanks for any help.

Re: Raise participation on a small team
 

We were already a sizeable team, but we had a great influx of interested students this year because we put an air cannon on the field at a few of our home football games. We launched t-shirts and footballs donated mostly by the football team, cheerleaders, and a few from corporate sponsors (e.g. radio stations). Lots of people are willing to give you their advertising material to deliver.

Re: Raise participation on a small team
 

Do you have any friendly faculty members? We've had a lot of success at gaining new members through our faculty coaches, who talk up the program during math and science classes.

Can you do any demos or pitches at the middle schools that feed your high school? Can you partner with any other FRC teams in your vicinity for a more complicated demo to your high school community? How about the parents, where you could pitch the scholarship opportunities FRC gives you access to in addition to the learning opportunities for math, science, marketing, communication, etc? Getting parents on board can also help deal with the time situation.

Do you have any underclassman friends you might be able to talk into giving robotics a try? We got a few excellent recruits through things like one of our student leaders making a deal with her friend that she'd try the fall musical if the friend would try robotics. You can also help get people who seem interested but aren't quite willing to commit the time off the fence and onto the team by getting them to come to an off-season event and get a feel for the competition experience.

This may be rough with your staffing situation and it's more of a long-term solution, but FLL teams can provide a pipeline for new members. If you can manage getting a team or two started in the middle schools that feed you it can help provide a steady source of robotically-inclined freshmen.

Worst case, you might consider stepping down to FTC temporarily while you work on improving your recruiting. The budget and staffing requirements are a bit less harsh.

Re: Raise participation on a small team
 

We have also brought previous robots (or subsets, at least, like our Frisbee shooter sans climber and drive system) to the middle school spring fairs and fun days. In addition to being a lot of fun, it's a great recruiting tool. We discussed doing robot demos at our feeder schools a couple of years back. I'm not sure why we didn't do it, but it's certainly worth looking into.

Re: Raise participation on a small team
 

Thanks for your responses. We have tried launching stuff into crowds (we don't have a t-shirt cannon but we did launch frisbees with gift cards taped on using the robot from 2 years ago).

We do have a FLL team at our middle school (also chronically underfunded and without a strong student base). Despite sending members to help the middle school team (myself being one), we are only seeing maybe one or two students come in (and then we still have to fight to keep them). Our middle school is suffering from mold problems, so they are currently split into 3 different locations, making demos that much harder to pull off (besides having to miss school). We have tried to bring the robot to middle (and even elementary) school fun/science days, but we have been met with FIRST or the school district's red tape.

We try to go around to as many physics classes as we can (because kids in physics tend to like STEM more than average). We don't have the manpower to go around to every science class, but having science teachers talk about joining the team sounds like a good idea.

Despite being extremely popular (not), not having many members now means we don't have many friends to pull in. That being said, friends were our biggest source of members this year, bringing in 2 seniors. Thanks for all of your ideas, still open to more!

Re: Raise participation on a small team
 

My team has two FTC teams that are bringing NINE kids up after this season. I understand that you said your team doesn't have many funds, so starting FTC teams is probably out of the question. Last year, we did a demo at a local hockey game which got some people interested. We also have made videos promoting our team and we posted it to social media. (Example) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-comcybWd98