5 Minute Sales Pitch to Potential New Members

[gluxon]

My team is giving classroom presentations this week and next to help recruit new members for the team. These presentations are limited to the beginning of the period and consist of 5 minutes long. What we say this week will make a big difference in potentially changing the direction of someone's life.

Currently, the example tips that were sent out mainly have veteran members talking about FIRST and its mission for half the time. I do think this is nice, but it's not what's going to make an effective sales pitch. The goal is to try and get the audience to attend the new member information meeting.

I think the following bullets are what will be the most effective to cover.

• Apply knowledge and gain experience working with real-world applications
• Diverse community. Many aspects of robot and possible ways to show your undiscovered talent. Ex: Mechanical design, electrical, programming
• Place for everyone. Groups work on things not even related to just building the robot. Ex: Websites, video editing, award essay writing
• Learning as a priority. Many members become capable leaders with just the desire to know more. Not having prior experience with robots is ok!
• (And if everything else doesn't work) FRC participation looks great on a transcript and many FRC scholarships are available

My question now to this community is this: What aspects of FRC do you think are the most attractive and make you want to participate? Or, why are you on your FRC team now? What would you put in your own set of bullets?

[joelg236]

Kids have short attention spans and like cool stuff. They'll be attracted to fun-looking things. We showed a match from Einstein and 118's reveal video in our first meeting. It engages students in a way talking just doesn't.

[Mr V]

You forgot the most important part

It is incredibly FUN.

Also stress that the only thing that is required to join is the desire to be a part of the action and the desire to learn at least a little something along the way.