First of all, the recruitment strategies you guys do seem pretty on point. I think I'll agree that making a robot like this seems hard to make to a new student and that it might deter some from joining. Something we do on our team (we have 109 people) is we go to a club fair (where the whole school goes during lunch to sign up for clubs) we sometimes take the robot there, but we always use a Google form and take down names and emails. We then add them to our email list and send out emails when we have meetings and mandatory meetings for parents and students. In these introductory meetings, we do a few things. We first start off with how much commitment is involved, the responsibilities involved, etc. We then show competition/match footage as well as some FIRST footage. We also list our accomplishments, show the awards, and drop the fact that there are 20 million dollars worth of scholarships available to FIRST students. Usually, we have a balance of student leaders and mentors show all this, so that way parents can see our leaders and what type of people our team helps us become as well as students can see that there are mentors who will guide them through the robot building process. Being a huge team, we have 7 build leads (4 captains, 3 coordinators), and we also tell them that the leaders will help the mentors teach everyone during MidKnight U (which is a several week workshop that we do to train new people) as well as build the two robots during the season (so there's plenty to do). That's part of what 1923 does to recruit people. We also tell them about how many leadership positions we have (something like 15-20) and how that might look good on college apps in the future. We are switching to a different recruitment strategy this coming season, but I didn't want suggest that as the point of that is to bring our numbers down to 70 (we aren't kicking anyone off, it the amount that show up after paying dues anyway). Just a little background, we have a very competitive school district where parents try and make their kids do everything, so many joining without realizing that it will be as much commitment as a sports team (I sure didn't realize it when freshman year when I tried to do swim team and this
). But anyways, I wish you good luck on recruiting!