Hi Ivan,
I have had some pretty good success in this department, but it took some time for things to develop. First I’ll give the long term approach that worked for me, then I will follow with what I use for presentations.
The first thing you need to do is to get support from upper management – once you have them on board it makes it much easier to schedule presentations and recruit engineers. Make a list of any VPs and Directors that you think would be supportive then talk to your local RD and have them invited to the regional. Follow this up with a personal invitation from yourself to each of them.
Concurrent with this talk to your local communications manager, part of their job is to support outreach and look for PR opportunities which makes this person your best friend. Try to get them to write articles about your team for the company newsletter. If the company sponsors the team leverage that and make it known that they aren’t simply funding a team convince them that this team is considered a collaborative effort between the school and the company and that how the team functions reflects on the company. In other words start taking steps to try to make them feel like they have some ownership of the team.
If your company has Brown Bag lunch presentations – try to find out who manages that schedule and see if you can give a couple each year. We always have one right after kick off and another some time after the season wraps up. Also see if you can arrange a tour for the team, any time you can get the kids onsite it will be noticed by your fellow employees.
Have a list of all the schools in the area that could use help so that you can match people up with teams that are convenient for them to work with. As others have pointed out, don’t make it an all or nothing type scenario. The first step should be just getting people to come to an event or to stop by a school to see what’s going on. If it’s the right person the program sells itself from there.
Regarding specifics on presentations – if you can bring a robot and team members in definitely do that. I always start with the FIRST Promo video. It gives a great overview of FIRST, and Dean’s comments at the end really underline why it’s important. You can download a copy or contact your local RD and they can probably get you a copy of the FIRST promotional DVD.
http://usfirst.org/community/resourcecenter.aspx?id=652
Another thing I like to do is to play animations or actual footage of matches from at least two or three different years to show just how much the challenge changes each year. Occasionally I will also show one of the National Chairman’s videos to demonstrate that there is much more to this than just building a robot. Once you are through with the videos you can open the floor for questions and you will have plenty to discuss.
Hope that helps,
Dennis