Recruiting
 

Hey everyone I was wondering what do all of you do out there to recruit new members on your teams.

Re: Recruiting
 

The best way everyone will surely post is getting to kids at the middle school or elementary school level. Word of mouth has always been important to our team; getting our friends to join worked decently well last year without any concentrated or organized effort. This year, we need to expand a fair amount (we'll have 9 gaping holes in two years when my class graduates - and right now we're only 13 students :ahh: with two seniors leaving now :ahh: :ahh: ), so I'll be interested in what other responses people give.

Re: Recruiting
 

Indoctrinate them while they're young and impressionable. Demonstrations to local middle schools are always really helpful, as well as having a freshman teacher show videos of your team at regionals (from SOAP or your team's own recording) to incoming freshmen during the first few days at school. We had one of our freshmen teachers do it this year, and we had students from the Class of 2009 practically flooding our table at Club Rush when they were signing up for clubs at the start of the year.

Re: Recruiting
 

well we currently take our robot to the day that fresman sign up for clubs so we get some fresman, but we need more upperclassman because all of our freshman do Botball another robotics program.

Re: Recruiting
 

Were going to try and do a lot of word of mouth this year as well as showing video from our trips to the competitions. We may also try "rolling admissions" so the effect of word of mouth takes further effect.

Re: Recruiting
 

Our school has a freshman orientation for freshman and their parents at the end of each summer, and clubs can have tables in the gym to promote themselves. There is also a "club fair" one day in the second or third week of school.

We also put up posters in the hallways to advertise our start-of-the-year informational meeting and have the meeting included in the morning announcements leading up to that day.

We have a small team so we need to do a lot of recruitment next year. Our rookie team hasn't begun to interact with the district's middle schools, so the incoming freshmen will not have heard of our team. Hopefully some more ideas will come up.

Re: Recruiting
 

We presented our 2005 robot at a club day thing (got lots of people to watch, especially when we tried to cap a gazebo with a chair), but other than that everything has been through word of mouth (this includes everyone trying to drag their friends in, making announcements of club meetings, putting notices on TV if you have them at your school, and putting up fliers for the first few meetings).

We had the best success we've ever had at actually getting people to come initially; between 40-50 people came to our first meeting. Unfortunately, we haven't yet mastered the art of keeping students who come to meetings, so that quickly dropped to probably 15 or 20 kids. It was back up to about 30 by the time build came around though, mainly because we accept any members at any time as long as you are willing to do something (there are some kids who didn't join until the first day of build, yet contributed more than kids who had been there since the first meeting).

Doing some other things to get you recognized at the school work well too; alot of the previous members wore their robotics shirts during school (I currently own 3 shirts from each of the past 3 years, totaling 9 shirts), and we held a LAN party at the school as a fundraiser.

Re: Recruiting
 

Well the word of mouth really doesn't work too well at my school because it usually gets to one person and that person is like forget it I don't want to pass that on... and signs are usually ignored.... are there any other attractive ways to involve more people

Re: Recruiting
 

Our team mentors 3 Lego League teams and a VEX team. A cool thing about our VEX team, the Cyber Stangs 56, is that they are what we call our 'eighth grade interns.' During the build season, the VEX kids came to our shop and lab several times and tried out the machines and programs, so that when they get to become freshmen, they already know about how our team works and the commitment it takes to be on an FRC team. We have had articles published in our local and school newspapers about Cyber Blue and FIRST. We have Project Lead The Way courses at our school, and the teacher is one of our team sponsors. We also have videos on our morning announcements that try to rope in new members. However, a lot of new members hear about FIRST robotics by our team members.

Re: Recruiting
 

Drive the big, scary robot around at lunch. Let people try it out. Tell them YOU built it.

Then... while all the interested people are crowded around, go find the people looking from a distance, and go let them know that they too could build a robot. Something they can learn. Get the people on the edge - who might not even think engineering is something they can do.

OK - I made that up - we have the opposite problem. Money, Space, and Adults for one team, students for 3. But it should work.

Re: Recruiting
 

has anyone tried a pep rally? if so how did it go? what did you guys do at the pep rally?

Re: Recruiting
 

Soley for the robotics team? No. But we have demonstrated our robot during part of a pep rally before. People have liked it both times we did it, we usually get comments of "how the heck did you guys do that", "that was cool", or things like that. I'm not entirely sure how many people it convinced to join the club, as they've both been done towards the end of the school year.

In 2005 we used our robot to cap a few tetras out on a goal, mainly looking cool because we showed off that we could hoist a tetra 13 feet into the air and drive around with the same ease as when our robot is at the 5 foot normal limit. I wasn't there, but they also used either the 2002 or 2001 robot during its respective year to show off how much their robot could pull, and pulled a cart (don't know if it had wheels on the bottom or not, I'm pretty sure it did) with the entire offensive line of the football team on it. They would have pulled more but didn't have a big enough cart.

Currently a few of us are trying to think of how to create balls the same size as poof balls filled with something (t-shirts or other goodies) to shoot out of this year's robot for pep rallys or football games. It would require no modification of this year's robot, which would make it very simple to do. I just don't know what we'd want to use so that it wouldn't hurt people if it hit them.

Re: Recruiting
 

Does your school allow you to shoot things that fast at people??? Also t-shirts would be the safest thing

Re: Recruiting
 

Our robot from Raising the Bar (2 years ago) hung on a basketball hoop rim during one of our pep rallies. That seemed pretty effective for getting a "wow, that's pretty cool" from everyone - don't know how many recruits we got from it though. Our team also helped at a local FLL event and were able to show our robot off. Hopefully that will bring some recruits down the road.

Re: Recruiting
 

one organization:
FLL
get involved

Re: Recruiting
 

We are also losing half of our team because of the graduation issue this year (fortunately it sounds like one or two may be coming back as mentors!)

For things like the lunch, can that be done at the beginning of next school year? Our mentor crew is out of town already for this summer.

While the FLL and elementary/middle schools are good, does anyone have any more immediate recruitment methods?

Re: Recruiting
 

We do FLL every year, but FLL is more of a long term recruitment and many kids that don't continue with robotics forget how it was.. so are there any other ways to get them excited again about robotics..

Re: Recruiting
 

That what happened to us last year. When we started we were only 8 people, but we recruited more and when the season started we were 30+ :ahh:

Here are some ways:
-have a car wash/donation event. While you guys are washing cars, ask one of your people to introduce them to your robot and let them drive it. We got a lot of home schoolers and freshmen because of this.
-Home GAMES!!.. take your robot to the home games and do like a shenanigan with it. Like the time we chased our principal around the track with or 2005 robot, during the half time. We also built a Basketball Robot, just for the sake of entertainment and using it to recruit more people.
-Morning announcements in school. DO IT!.... its slow but it will help
-After School event or during class event. this year before we shipped out the robot, we took it in the senior hallway and shot balls out of it. Whoever catches a ball gets a candy....

Thats just some of the stuff we did. We also go to the Museums and Fairs with our robot and recruit mentors and students from other schools etc.

let me know if you have any questions..

Re: Recruiting
 

We are currently losing 8 seniors and from interest forms from the upcoming Freshmen Magnet class of 2009, we will be gaining 55 people. This will bring the number up to 149 people.

We do A LOT of outreach events and many kids from these outreach events transfer into our school district to take part in our club.
We have this thing called wildcat daze at our school where all the clubs and organizations have a booth. At this booth we always have a couple of FRC bots, a couple of FLL bots, and a VEX bot or two. This always attracts people. We also work with many local FLL teams. By getting to know these kids and mentors of a lot of teams on a personal level, we can recruit a lot of them into the next level.
We also mentor a few teams and the kids on these teams that are moving up to high school are ither coming to our school to join up and a few are going to their schools to try and get teams started there.

Re: Recruiting
 

We chronically have these sort of problems, our team varies from small to smaller, or larger, with a lot of people standing around talking. I'm personally out to build a T-Shirt cannon robot with our six years of pneumatics hardware and some random drive parts. (Triple rapid-fire launchers baby, two compressors a piece)

Re: Recruiting
 

what type of shirts are you guys talking about.. school shirts, team shirts,

Re: Recruiting
 

For the past few years my team has hosted an off-season regional competition at our school.

This is a GREAT way to get people to join, albeit very difficult to organize and pull off.

Leading up to the event we do a lot of promotion and advertising at school, handing out fliers and driving the robot in the quad... We also put the dates and times of when it is to take place in both local and school newspapers.

When the competition happens we usually have fabulous turnout. People who have nothing to do with robots/high-school show up just to watch.

Not only do we rope new members but we also sell stuff (which brings in a lot of money for the club).

Re: Recruiting
 

If it were something like t-shirts I see no reason why not (can't be worse than getting hit by a badly thrown football at a game). The problem I'm trying to think of is how to make a t-shirt with a 7" diameter when in a ball that won't get scuff marks all over it from getting shot. The t-shirt would be whatever the school wants us to shoot; I just want them to remember it was a robot that gave it to them.

As has been mentioned, morning announcements are EXTREMELY effective. It is pretty much the only form of communication we had this year with team members besides word of mouth if we happened to see them at school.

From our experience, FLL has actually not been a very effective recruiting tool. Not a reason to give it up, but don't count on it for drawing students in.

The biggest thing to me is still word of mouth. Half our members are in marching band, and this is because kids in marching band always convince other ones to "come along and see the club".

Re: Recruiting
 

I haven't tried it, but wrapping it in saran wrap then adding flour to reduce friction should work. Incidentally, roughly half of our team is in band too... I wonder if there's a connection.

Re: Recruiting
 

I was thinking something like that might work (shrink wrap has already been suggested as well). If the flour is to prevent scuff marks on the outer wrap we wouldn't care, I just don't want the shirt all blackened. The flour could give a nice "cannon" effect though if it goes all over the place when fired.

Re: Recruiting
 

We do demos at local middle schools, and we see many of these students later go onto FIRST robotics, especially those who were in FLL. 604's school, Leland High, sits next to Bret Harte Middle School. Most students that attend this middle shool end up going to our high school. Also, our school has a Club Day in September, where we recruit our new members.

Re: Recruiting
 

those are some great ideas, but how do you guys convince people who say they don't think they have enough time to commit to robotics to join or at least give it a try?

Re: Recruiting
 

Zoheb N -
First of all you are doing a great job with this thread and trying to help your team. I think it is cool.
Second - I spoke with an '05 alum from 118 this Saturday at Mindstorms Mania here at UT. I asked her to explain your program to me. It is my understanding that 118 is comprised of team members from 3 schools and that you build at NASA. If I have any of this wrong, please correct.

Having a team made up of different schools poses lots of challenges and not having your build site on campus where students can drop by also poses challenges. I'm bringing this up so that other teams can see this and maybe offer suggestions as to how to deal with these constraints.

One thing we've done the past 2 years is have a car bash. We've found a local business that will donate the car and we charge so much to bash. This gets the word out that the team is fun as well as hard working. A key to this is promotion, publicity.

Re: Recruiting
 

you got the information right... soo you guys get a car and charge kids to bash the car??? is that right

Re: Recruiting
 

Right. You have to get permission from your principal or administrator in advance. It's an old junker from a car lot (business) that they sell used parts from, etc. The owner has the car brought to our school parking lot and he comes back and hauls it off. Last year we asked that the glass be left in it, this year they removed all the glass but we forgot to ask. They remove the battery, the oil, etc. The team sets up the place out-lining the perimeter with caution tape. Everyone has to wear safety goggles when in the area and when bashing. We provide the big swingers for bashing. A couple of the handles have been split. We figured out to charge by minutes. So much for a minute and so much for 5. I can maybe swing 3 really good swings so you wouldn't make much off of me but if I even just stand there looking cool in my safety glasses for 5 minutes you've still made some bucks.
However, this particular event is seen more as building community in the school and getting the robotics word out there rather than for profit. Teams usually disappear into their build space - daylight isn't that bad, fresh air is good, bashing cars - fun. The team cleans up all the mess, leaving the parking lot spit spot. One thing we thought of this year is to write teachers' names on the car and see if that would be a good draw. We'll see next year. Usually around Homecoming but it might be a good release for finals week too if anyone could stop long enough to wield some iron.

Re: Recruiting
 

I am convinced there is. There are many schools where there is big overlap here.

Teams might want to do some targeted recruiting.

Re: Recruiting
 

I wouldn't say targeted recruiting is nessecary. There are many students on our team that have a lot of other commitments and really cant commit to a role on the Build Team. However, usually the people that have a lot of other commitments take roles that require less time or work on things that don't conflict with their seasonal sport/activity.

Re: Recruiting
 

We did a demo at a pep rally for the basketball team too. Didn't think of it before my last post.

I'm not sure how effective that was in getting people interested. The one problem with a pep rally demo is that even when students found out that our school has a new "robotics team", there was no information about what to do if they were interested (what this whole robotics thing is, where to find info, who to talk to, etc), and they still had no sense of what the demonstration was all about.

On the other hand, if we had known we would have the demo more than a couple days in advance, we could have asked for more time in the pep rally and shown a short video about FIRST, which would solve the above problem.

Regardless, any demonstration for recruitment has to be informative enough so that people won't dismiss their interest due to not knowing what to do with it. I've learned that it's important to make sure people know what they're looking at without having to pick up a piece of paper or even ask a question.

Re: Recruiting
 

The trick truely is FLL. Our FLL team is about 6-10 members big each year and we get at least 1/2 of those students. Another good thing is families ;) . Have brothers recruit their sisters and vice-versa. It is good to build teams in that family atmosphere.

Re: Recruiting
 

Thanks you guys for all the cool ideas if you guys can think of any others before school starts please post them cause i know this won't just help me but it will help many other teams out there

Re: Recruiting
 

I am confused... In what way does this promote you guys as hardworking? I can see how it would raise money but how does it get people to join the club? What connection does it have to robotics?

All the same, it sounds fun

Re: Recruiting
 

Ok, let me try to explain this.

418 is LASA Robotics. LASA is The Liberal Arts and Sciences Academy, a magnet school.
It is set down into LBJ High School, a public high school. We have 2 very different student populations under one roof. We do 2 recruiting events with the robots and information in the high school, one in fall and one in spring. The typical response to the robotics team from a number of students is: it's too hard, it's too much like school, it takes too much time, it's for geeks.

We came up with the car bash at Homecoming. It has nothing to do with robotics but it is sponsored by us. We think it is helping build a bridge of communication between the two populations and getting the word out that the team knows how to have fun as well as work hard, also trying to involve others in doing a fun event together.

The robotics team has a wonderful set-up: a metal shop, a wood shop, a computer lab. At the beginning of this fall, the computer lab was split in half and turned from one into two classrooms. The desks didn't fit so the team dismantled them and put them back together in different configurations. No internet until *someone* *cough* rigged something up in the ceiling....
The metal and wood shops are still in tact. This is where the team lives. They arrive early in the morning, come during lunch, stay after school if they can - don't get out much. It isolates the team, unless other students come by and stick their head in. That happens. We have basketball players stop by, the art teacher, the principal comes down. If you want your school to help support you with funding and promotion you have to be a part of the school. It is a little harder for LASA Robotics to do that but we try with things like the car bash. I've been pushing for a catapult for a couple of years but so far no one is listening. I think it would be cool to launch pumpkins.....

Hope this explains it better.
Jane

Re: Recruiting
 

one of the moms from our team called our school during nationals to tell them when our team was competing, and instructed the office to pass it on to classroom teachers... I was fairly surprised how many teachers had their classes tune in, but it finally made what I had been obsessing over for the past couple of months make sense to the people in my classes, and I know that after people watched the web-casts or the NASA broadcast the interest generated was high--I had people I would have never thought would be interested in joining the team coming up to me and asking me all sorts of questions. :ahh: Also we have a lot of FLL graduates who will be joining our team next year.

Re: Recruiting
 

we do demos during our lunch periods. also were big on female involvement (chick power), so we did a women in science and engineering day presentation. we had female engineers form our corporate sponsor come and talk about there experience in science and tech. also another first student and i talked about how kick $@#$@#$@# first is. i can personally say that we got a HUGE amount of response.

Re: Recruiting
 

We do a demo at our local Pumpkin Fest in October (Keene holds the record for the most lit jack-o-lanterns in one place, 28,952), and there are tens of thousands of people there, so a lot of people see us, especially the younger elementary and middle school students. We also do a demo at the school during a day in the fall, and people stop by and give us contact info. In addition to this, we put our meeting times in the school announcements. This got us about 10-13 new members this year. The number does change year to year, but our methods are consistent.

Re: Recruiting
 

Actually I have thought of this T-Shirt cannon with a few designs from the web and I think that that would be a decent recruitment meathod at like a school Pep-Rally. On one of the old robots just put this "Pneumatic Cannon" on and fire t-shirts away.

The awnser to that is Team Shirts so they know about your team and organization etc.

Pavan.
118 Electrical.

Re: Recruiting
 

alot of people dont know much about the team and just think were a bunch of geeks. (well, they're right) its our job to go out and show them that there is a geek hidden deep inside of them too. for instance, i got two my friends to join simply by telling how good they would do and asking them to come to meetings. it helps to encourage, remind, welcome and include new members.

WHAT OUR TEAM DID RECENTLY
our team tried hosting a booth at a semi-popular local event and letting people drive some pre-built vex's. we gained some intrest, sponsors, possible mentors, $76 bucks, and 1 team member. overall, it didn't work out too well.

-Smithers

Re: Recruiting
 

That sounds like a success to me! You checked the box in 5 areas. And hopefully you had some fun as well!