[Levansic]

Our team has a dedicated portable hard drive that we dump pictures to, during or immediately after an event. We've scanned all of the old newspaper clippings and real photos we could find, and store that information on that drive.

Occasionally, we get paranoid (a portable hard drive juggled by high school students!!!) and back this drive up on several other computers. Really though, this is just a handy media store for us, which will soon be replaced by several thumb drives. Caching pictures is the easy part.

The hard part is distilling and compiling all of the pictures into a form that records the story. It is so much easier to snap a few pictures of "something happening" than to record the context for a non-observer to understand.

Last year, our team compiled an iBook, that was really a much bigger superset of our Chairman's presentation. It was put together to explain OUR specific team to new members, parents, and generous benefactors. Some judges would look at our iBook when they stopped in our pit. We intended to publish it on Apple's store, but ran into financial hardship when we won a RCA and had to scrap everything non-essential to attend the Championship. We missed our funding goals this year when many of our sponsors cut way back, and the small $99 fee was out of our budget.

This year, we intend to push further with this excellent and dynamic format, and actually publish two books. Our team is actively recruiting journalism students from our school, as budget cuts have eliminated the student newspaper. We want to give an outlet for these students, and further erode the stereotype that pocket protectors are required for club membership. We hope that this strategy will gain us a few missing links in our story-telling process.

On specifics of tracking impact, count only the people your team members have real interaction with. We do not count impact by any adult mentors, and insist that students are the public face of our club. Our team is in a rural and remote area. In addition to many events in our own community, we go way out of our way for outreach, because we have to. Last year, we plotted all of our distance outreach events, and came up with a very conservative geographical impact footprint of 3,600 sq. miles. I don't remember offhand what our cumulative count of individual people was, but it was substantial, and backed by tallies taken at each event. Our club is only second in community influence to our football team, and they are nearly undefeated every year.

-- Len