Re: Budgets?
 

No no, it's $32,000 spent so far this year WITH travel, but we're missing mr. healey's stuff and a LOT of Mr. P's stuff, so I'm estimating closer to $36-37k

Re: Budgets?
 

We are always fundraising :ahh: We raise about 7K for the 2006 challenge :eek:

Re: Budgets?
 

FIRST recommends a minimum budget of about 10-15k. Thats enough for registration, robot parts, and travel costs. Most teams I would guess average around 20-25k which gets them to two regionals. The big boys get about 40k+ which is a huge amount of money. I've assembled alot of information for my proposal to Lockheed. Hope it is of some help.

Re: Budgets?
 

Our team had a budget of about $25,000.

We spent $11,000 on registration fees (1 Regional + Atlanta), students must pay for their own travel.

We spent another $1600 on the robot. We are fortunate enough to have a near by machine shop do all of our machining for FREE! Plus Industrial Metal Supply is nice enough to give us huge breaks on material. Plus several thousand we spent of prototyping.

Marketing and Give Aways take up a large portion of our budget. In Las Vegas we brought 1000 buttons ($230) , 250 'Team 1538 - The Holy Cows' Sharpies ($320), 300 'Got FIRST' shirts ($300) and 150 iPod cases. We haven't taken inventory of what we have left, but I know we were running low on everything by the end of competition and will probably have to make second runs on 'Got FIRST' shirts, sharpies and buttons for Atlanta. Our competition banner, team shirts and sweatshirts cost another $600.

Re: Budgets?
 

1745 runs on about . . 9000(but if we go to nationals that number will be some where around 20k)

6K goes twards registration.
$250 twards the bot
about $150 twards shiny/blinky/ other red and blue items we like
all the rest goes twards travel and hotels

the way we raised money was not only the basic asking from companies/ local businesses but going door to door to the residents of our city explaining who we were, what first was, then asking for a $10 or $20 donation . . the joke was that we raised 2k 20 bucks at a time, if you live in a large enough city your potential sponsorship base is virtually unlimited.

Re: Budgets?
 

In two days we will be meeting with our school administration to discuss the future of our two-year-old robotics program. One hurdle we face is trying to put our administrators at ease with the cost of participating in FIRST robotics, particularly funding a FRC team. I know budgets have been brought up here (and in NEMO) before and I have gained knowledge looking through the responses. I am now looking for some “fresh data” to bring to our meeting, so if any of you don’t mind sharing, what is your typical yearly team budget? (If you're not comfortable, PM me.) Thanks!

Re: Budgets?
 

Right now our team has about 0 dollars, haha
We may actually be in debt.
Mostly we get all our money from donations, we ask everybody!
Besides that our main mentor (Steve Kew-Goodale) pretty much pays for things in advance, like our hotel and such. Plus he makes sure that he pays for everyone's food while at the regional; it's also free to be on the team.
Yea we make absolutely no money whatsoever...

Re: Budgets?
 

675 paid for registration and one other regional, that's 10k right there, then we got about 2k$ worth of tools donated, spent probably 1k or less on metal for the robot + another set of CIM's and gearboxes, and I know we have 10k secured for travel to/from Atlanta.

That's what we get for having 6 (or maybe more? I don't know all of them) sponsors and some very loving mentors. =]

Re: Budgets?
 

Our team goes balls-out (forgive the expression, but it's the best way to describe it) when it comes to going to local companies to find sponsorship. This year we came up with about 34k of funding, and through three regionals and a highly complex bot, we now are sitting on about 12-15k (not sure of the exact budget, I'm just the drive guy...).

Basically, get the message of FIRST out there, show people a robot, and mention that you're in High School, and sponsorship should be available no matter what. With something as amazing as FIRST, nothing should get in the way of funding a team.

Re: Budgets?
 

Three regionals and a complex bot probably comes out to 17-18k.