Our team has never recruited much until last & this year, but we always hovered around the 60ish number generally. This year, we did a demo during club day with our '05 and '06 robot and another smaller demo with our '05 robot. We also had a massive poster up for like a month announcing our first meeting and we hung up flyers talking about it too in almost every class room, especially in the math and science building, and had announcements for two weeks or so. Also try emphasizing that robotics is more than just engineering, talk about the operations half too, like media and pr and finance. I think that this year because of that, we got about 10 new members for media and pr. Hope this helped
Our school offers our team pretty much no support so good luck receiving that grant from your school.