[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by SuperNerd256

1.Who do you have sponsor you?

Our main financial sponsors are NASA and JC Penny. I suspect a lot of younger teams are a lot like this. Together they cover $7,000 of our ~$11,000 budget.

We have used the NASA Rookie grant for 3 years. You are only likely to get this for two, however, reading the rules carefully NASA said they would be willing to give a limited number of grants to teams in their third year. We decided to apply, because there was simply no reason not to and we desperately needed the money. We were pleasantly surprised to receive the grant!

The lesson to take away here is to carefully read the regulations for grants and funding and apply if you have any shot of getting it. It certainly can't hurt, and we owe our season to NASA. Without a second regional, we wouldn't have been able to inspire kids the way we did this year, and we certainly wouldn't have been able to bring school board members to an event.

Our other main financial sponsor is Sneeringer, Monahan, Provost, Redgrave Title Agency - one of our parent's firms who contributes a large sum to 2791.

We are sponsored in other useful ways other than monetarily. Anderson Power Products supplied us with most of our electronics parts this year free of charge, letting us make a super cool removable electronics board. Noel's Machine Shop did lots of CNC operations for our robot and was responsible for many, MANY of the parts on the robot. Douglas Industrial gave us any bolt, screw, or rivet we needed free of charge. While they don't help pay the FRC registration fee, these sponsors are invaluable.

We also receive sponsorship from "One Proud Nana!" - our head mentor's mother.

2.Where are they located?

NASA and Anderson are far away.

Our local JC Penney sponsored us. They are located in Latham, a few miles from the team.

SMPR Title Agency is located in Albany, another few miles from the team.

Douglas Industrial is about a 2 minute drive from Shaker High - we make regular runs to them.

Noel's is a similar distance.

3.What do they do?

See above.

4.Are they reliable?

Absolutely. Shaker doesn't have many sponsors, but the sponsors we do have are AMAZING.

5.Do they give you money, services, free stuff?

Yes.

6.Are they good at the services they do, if any?

Yes.

In particular with Noel's - we ask them to do things that should be impossible, and they figure it out free of charge. One of our mentors asked them to mill a hex pattern into a sprocket. Seriously. And they returned a durable result that lasted the entire competition season.

7.Who is your best sponsor?

I don't want to single out any one sponsor - we could not survive without a single one of them. I'm not exaggerating - we needed every sponsor or we would have gone to one event. Our performance as a team at WPI would not have inspired students the way our performance as a team (not win-loss record) at CT did.

8.How do you get people to sponsor you?

Asking them is a good start.