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Originally Posted by VexisDarksteele
We're a collaborative team between two high schools. All of our meetings are conducted at the newer school, because that's where our coach is employed and where we have access to a machine shop. The older school has about 1,400 students; the newer one has approximately 950-1,000.
There's been a huge decline in robotics enrollment of students from the older school, because it's simply too difficult to get a steady presence over there when all of our stuff is based in the other one. We try to attend the other school's curriculum fairs and other events, but our coach is the only one with a trailer that can transport the robot, and we depend on his schedule for when we can do this kind of stuff.
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Ok, now just to give you a little background on where I'm coming from, we are based in a single private school of about 1,300 students.
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Low retention rates for teams are not uncommon. In our rookie year, my team went from 65 students at the first meeting to ~15 by our regional. This year we brought the number up to about 25-30 people after having an additional 70 people sign up. There are 2 big things we utilize that get so many people to sign up.
1. Co-curricular fairs - Make sure you get your robot on display, try to get as many people as possible to put their email on a piece of paper, and give them a date for an introductory meeting. Even if 1 of every 5 people stay on the team, you can still rack up numbers really quickly. Just have the students be friendly and talk about how awesome robotics is.
2. Word of Mouth - I can not understate how important this is. In 2012, my main circle of friends had a couple of other hard-core robotics guys in it. And because we wouldn't shut up about how awesome robotics is, we ended up with ~5 of our friends joining the team. It just works. And the great thing is that people are very likely to stay on the team if they were recruited by their friends.
My suggested solution for communication is also 2-fold:
1. Team Groupme - Groupme is basically a group text messaging system. Use it to remind people about a meeting, or to tell them to check an important email.
2. Word of Mouth - Again, this is a solution. Just ask people to forward message on to teammates when they see them.
If people still don't do what they need to do, then I guess they are just gonna miss out. Then they will learn to do better in the future.
Now I'm going to tell you something that you probably aren't going to like to hear. And its only my opinion, you don't have to agree or listen to it. But, your team might want to consider laying off on the outreach type stuff for a little bit. The way I see it, teams should fundamentally run off of this list of priorities in order(yes, another list):
1. Make sure that your team will sustain itself.
2. Be able to consistently field some-what competitive robots.
3. Outreach.
4. #4 and on are different for every team.
Your struggling with #1, so you really need to focus your energy on that. If your team doesn't survive, then it can't do more outreach.
I'm sorry that your going through this. I have gone through a similar feeling. It's tough, but you just need to have hope and remember that even if your original team is gone, there will always be another team out there that will welcome you in as a mentor and make you feel at home.