Quote:
Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe
By having your smaller events spread out you are also able to tap into a larger volunteer supply. It's more difficult to convince people to travel and pay for a hotel to go volunteer for an event than it is to get them to volunteer for one in their own back yard.
According to the MN numbers last year you'd need 11 events based on a 40 team max per event.
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As a few other people have noted here, the issue isn't so much sheer number of bodies to fill volunteer roles as much as reliable volunteers to fill key roles.
It is a work in progress, but it isn't going to happen over night. As of the 2015 FRC season, we had 1 returning FTA, 1 new FTA, 1 local FTAA, a handful (4 or 5?) scorekeepers, 1 local field supervisor, and 1 field supervisor from Iowa.
That's obviously just a couple of the key positions, and some of them (LRIs) we now have a fairly healthy number of. However, people can't just show up and start volunteering for these roles. Many of these roles require a high level of familiarity with FRC, a high level of interpersonal skills, and a high level of commitment to volunteering with the program. Once we have identified those people, we need at least a year to train them in for their role.
As Mr. V's post touched on, I think the biggest issue is that we grew incredibly quickly. The majority of our participants since when MN launched its first regional are either in college or only a couple years out of college. Obviously the rapid growth isn't a "problem" we can fix in MN- it is already done. What we can do is continue to work towards fixing our immediate problem, which is getting more volunteers and making some MN FIRST organizational changes to better support the program.