After many years, (this will be our ninth year) support of our team within our school(s) and school district has generally been on the rise. The
Board of Education for our town is now one of our two main sponsors. For many years (actually up until these past two to three years), our team was largely unknown among the school, faculty, and student population. But starting in 2005, we began to see our support within our schools rise. It started slowly and it took a lot of effort, but in the end it's certainly beginning to pay off.
We started with having our team appear at every open house, student orientation, etc. with our team and some of our robot(s) to demonstrate. With the addition of Vex robots, and the ability of any random person walking by to drive a robot, was certainly a boost. We also succeeded in having a link to our team website put right near the top of the website of one of our schools. At the moment, our team is featured fairly prominent on the homepage of my
school's website. (This also happens to the default homepage for every single computer in our school.)
Our
team website has certainly helped a lot as well, as a great source of information for students, faculty, and sponsors. Another great marketing tool we found, which may be hard for some teams to come up with, is having someone ride
a Segway at team demonstrations. This is a great way to spark the curiosity of a lot of people, and when they come over, let them ride it for a minute or two, while giving them a nice little spiel about your team. From experience, it is quite successful for recruiting new members.
Also, don't just limit yourself to your school. Take your robot out to a fair, or a parade, or any kind of festival. Make a name for your team in not only the schools, but also in your community. Team 228 scored a massive front page article on our team just days before the 2006 UTC New England Regional this year. (The actual article took up about 70% of the front page, and quite to our surprise we learned that the accompanying image of
our 2005 student FVC coach and the robot was one of the most popular photo reprint requests ever in their 150 year history!)
The student population among our three schools is becoming more and more award of our team, in a positive sense of course. We've started a much more aggressive marketing campaign, with signs and banners in the hallways, more morning announcements, and prominent places on the school website. Almost every student knows robotics exists now.
In the near future, we are going to directly talk to the math, science, and technology departments to send "letters of recommendation" to some students as an "invitation" to join the robotics team based on their academic performance in the areas of math, computers, and/or tech ed. Currently, several other clubs at our school use this method for recruiting members, like the Youth and Government club (which I'm also a major part of), and they have a high success rate. (My computer programming teacher already volunteered to do this with her classes.)
The last hurdle we are facing is recruiting additional faculty members to help with our team. Since robotics usually involves a lot more commitment that an average club, but lacking the status of a varsity team, it's hard to recruit new faculty advisors. But hopefully this year, we will draft up the necessary paperwork needed to raise our team from "club" status to a lettering "team" and present it to our Board of Education.