[Michael Hill]

In my experience, big sponsors will sponsor a successful team over an unsuccessful one. Marketing departments tend to like their brand to be associated with winning. Sad, but true. If you're a team that performs well at competition, but still no big sponsors, I would suggest doing more outside of just your robot (outreach events). If companies see you're out in the community and supporting the community and doing good things, it's very easy to justify a sponsorship. Perhaps you also need to learn how to talk to potential sponsors. Unfortunately, that's a big personality thing. Find the kids most enthusiastic about robots and your team and have them approach the company. Only very rarely do mentors on our team approach a company. Most of our sponsorship comes from kids pounding the pavement and basically doing cold calls. We publish an annual sponsor book and place those in the businesses that sponsor us (as well as in the chamber of commerce). Some other team told us about this fund raising idea (sorry I forget who it was), but it has had very good results. We have best results when kids bring a robot with them.

In fact, we only have a few "big" sponsors. We get a lot from local places giving smaller amounts. In a way, I like to think it's more stable (though more difficult). If one of our big sponsors pulls out, we're not dead in the water money-wise.