[Trying to Help]

I'm a newbie to Chief Delphi and a relative newbie to FIRST. I'm hoping that there are experienced team members here who can offer advice about a problem that I can forsee us having.

My problem is that I think we need two phrases that are something like: "New financial organization start date" and "Team experience start date". We're a new team in many important senses. We just got our number late this fall, we didn't sign up as team until we were sure we'd raised the $6K for a regional (days before the deadline) so we missed some PTC training opportunities, we didn't have any existing software or many spare parts, etc. But more than five experienced team members left another team to start this one. So, we're not a rookie team. I'm OK with that.

My difficulty is that now that we built a robot and won an award, we want to write press releases, apply for new grants, solicit sponsors, etc. But if they look at the FIRST information, it has our rookie year as 2006 which we inherited from the other team. But we haven't had three years of fundraising under our belts. Or parts and tool collections. And so on.

So... how do we communicate that the rookie year number is a FIRST artifact without looking poorly? I don't want to look like a whiner or someone trying to explain away a lie. Do you put something in your grant application text? Do you try to make it a verbal explanation? What do you do?