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From a team's vantage point, the best way to demonstrate impact is through documentation. Take lots of pictures and get written feedback. Make scrapbooks of events, news items, flyers, etc. Leave the notebooks in your pit area and allow other teams to look through them.
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This is really, really good advice. Not just for purposes of documenting your Chairman's Award submissions but also for preserving your history. We did not do a great job of this in our first few years. (This was a comment we got a few times in our CA feedback.) Now we do a better job, and are trying to recapture our "lost" history as well. This year we started building an iBook that we hope to use it going forward to document our efforts. It was a fun project for me, because I got to reminisce about the past teams. It was great for the kids because many of them learned things about the team's earlier years they did not know. It is also making us think about our future, and focus more on plans. (That was also some of the constructive feedback we got from judges this year.)
We have also made a strong effort to keep track of our alumni, and this definitely has impressed judges. It also gives us a some hard data that is nice to have in the presentations. (I think that we also have an unfair advantage here, given that so many of our alumni go to Ohio State, which is local, and come back and mentor our team or other OSU supported teams. But it is something that is much easier to do in the Facebook era.)
We always struggle with what to include and what not to include. I try to push the kids to focus on the ongoing efforts, the things we do every year. The special things are great, but we try to emphasize the things we did while at least some of the current team members were members. Once your team has been around for a while, and has started getting serious about its FIRST mission, you will have lots of accomplishments. Sometimes those read like a laundry list. My advice is cut down on the number and focus on the ones of which you are the most proud and which best represent what your team has done.
For the past 8 years we have put together e-week (Engineering Week) lessons for elementary school (4th-6th grade) teachers. It does not take a huge effort. We have a few kids do some research and settle on an engineering activity. We write up a lesson plan and then offer the lessons as well as supplies to interested local teachers. A few hours work for a few kids (at least now that we don't try the counterproductive route of making thousands of individual kits and instead focus on classroom sets) and a couple hundred bucks (at most, this year was less). We have given away as many as 9600 kids worth of kits and as few as 800. This year was, I believe, around 2000. It is not something to rival helping to start up a regional or finding thousands of dollars to start new teams. But it is something that we do every year, and it has become one of "our things." So their are kids on the team who can talk intelligently about it when judges come around to our pits.
On a more philosophical level, I recently changed my signature to: "I always tell the kids, when you don't win the Chairman's Award that's not a bad thing. If you think you are deserving, but someone else is better, that mean's the message of FIRST is really getting out there." That is what I try to communicate to the kids. Other than this year, we probably had our strongest submission in 2010. (To my mind we were more "deserving" in 2010 than in 2009, when we won.) But 291 won the award. I talked a lot with one of their mentors and a bunch of their kids, and I had absolutely no doubt they deserved the win. There was another year (2008 I think) when 612 won, and I remember a couple of our kids saying "Could we ever be that good?" after talking with 612 about their efforts.
On to some of the good ideas. I will try (can't promise, because things are busy right now with trying to organize the trip to the Championships and negotiate the start of track & field season) to have our presentation record a practice presentation and post that to the web. I think this is a good idea. (When we publish our iBook it will have a lot about what we have done, and will include the presentation and team essay.) In our annual training day one of the sessions is about the Chairman's Award submission. I strongly encourage everyone to submit at least occasionally, even if you *know* you can't win. As other posters have mentioned, the process is valuable in itself. Almost every year, when we are rereading the essay or the kids are practicing the presentation, we reach some conclusions about things we will do differently the next time.