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

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

First,
See this thread

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

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

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.

LOL!

That has to be the best way in the world :D

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.

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.

Lee what happened to Inspiration FIRST??

wow....thats actually not a bad idea at all, hmm. we could charge people to drive at our schools open house, i don't like the idea of other people driving my bot though...

Elaborating
 

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.

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?

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".

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

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

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