[FRC Blog] Two Championship Survey Results and Path Forward

[Cory]

Originally Posted by ay2b

I have to disagree with you, Cory. 600 teams at $5,000 each is only $3,000,000. I count 19 "strategic partners"; I believe I remember hearing that was a minimum of $1,000,000 contribution to be listed as such. There's an additional 10 "founding partners", which I suspect is an even larger contribution. That's roughly 10x the money that teams pay, and is only counting the two two tiers of sponsorship.

I'd have to say that the highest paying (by a wide margin) stakeholders are the sponsors.

I actually completely missed Sean's line about sponsors when I posted. I agree. FRC teams are not as big of a financial contributor to FIRST as the sponsors are.

However, I think if you polled all the sponsors they're probably not stoked that they get two chances to give their company air time...they're probably wondering how the hell they're going to make their steadily shrinking budgets for FIRST cover two events instead of one.

[jeremylee]

Originally Posted by Cory

I actually completely missed Sean's line about sponsors when I posted. I agree. FRC teams are not as big of a financial contributor to FIRST as the sponsors are.

However, I think if you polled all the sponsors they're probably not stoked that they get two chances to give their company air time...they're probably wondering how the hell they're going to make their steadily shrinking budgets for FIRST cover two events instead of one.

This worries me even more. I don't see 2 "championships" bringing in much for additional sponsorship dollars, but I do see significant cost associated with putting on a 2nd "championship".

[ay2b]

Originally Posted by Cory

I think if you polled all the sponsors they're probably not stoked that they get two chances to give their company air time...they're probably wondering how the hell they're going to make their steadily shrinking budgets for FIRST cover two events instead of one.

Originally Posted by jeremylee

This worries me even more. I don't see 2 "championships" bringing in much for additional sponsorship dollars, but I do see significant cost associated with putting on a 2nd "championship".

Previously FIRST was selling the sponsors the ability to reach 600 teams at 1 event. Now FIRST is selling the ability to reach twice as many teams. I'm sure that if a company wants to buy advertising at ("sponsor") only one event, they can, but of course FIRST would encourage them to do both.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by ay2b

Previously FIRST was selling the sponsors the ability to reach 600 teams at 1 event. Now FIRST is selling the ability to reach twice as many teams. I'm sure that if a company wants to buy advertising at ("sponsor") only one event, they can, but of course FIRST would encourage them to do both.

1.5x as many teams, right? 2x400 vs 1x600.

I have heard that key Championship Event sponsors were not made aware of this plan before we were, or consulted at all as to their thoughts on/ability to support two events. That seems like a huge problem.

[Steven Smith]

From a personal standpoint and as a mentor, I have one opinion on the championship split, and I've expressed that in other posts.

However, I also have some visibility into the sponsor side, so I'll speak to my knowledge there. I'm not an official spokesman of company policy, but since I got involved with FIRST, I've been more involved with the circles where decisions are made regarding educational donations and have lobbied for more support for FIRST.

I see sponsorship dollars (at least at the Fortune 500 corporation level) as being a bit more flexible, with the ability to flex up to account for program growth.

Over $500 billion is spent annually on pre-K to 12th grade education in the US by government. At my company alone, we averaged ~$30M/year (2009-2014) in education related donations. Of course, I advocate for FIRST to get a bigger piece of the pie, but there are a lot of great organizations out there all trying to solve the workforce development problem in unique ways. I quote these numbers simply to say that FIRST is still quite small relatively speaking, and the available funding for education is quite large. If FIRST could truly solve all the educational problems by just throwing more money at it, I suspect it would have happened already. For the FIRST model to work though, you need volunteer/mentor growth in conjunction with funding. If ~200,000 FIRST volunteers averaged 50 hours a year, and it would take $25/hr incentive pay to pull in new volunteers by just throwing money at it, you need ~$250M/yr to double the size of FIRST (assuming doubled need of volunteers). On top of that, the existing volunteers might be a little miffed the new ones are getting paid and they aren't. Sponsor money is important, but volunteerism is the key to growth IMHO.

I think that if FIRST can continue to scale, continue to meet the objectives companies want in terms of increasing the quality and quantity of qualified students entering the workforce, increase its reach/availability to historically underrepresented groups in engineering, etc... funding for the program will continue to grow. We're also very much interested in growing our volunteer base, as employees that are passionate about mentoring, their communities, etc., often bring that passion to work, as well as provide positive representation of the company.

We don't really spend a lot of time talking in terms of "marketing/advertising" opportunities at championship(s). The discussion is typically more of "how can we be most efficient with our donated dollars". Do we fund program A or program B? Who has shown they can do more with less and spend our grant money wisely. There is also the consideration of supporting our employees. If they choose to volunteer with an organization, it increases our confidence in said organization, so we want to back their efforts with additional funds.

As this all relates to championships and the championship split (sorry for rambling)... if it results in an increased student experience and supports growth, it will probably be seen as a positive change. The logistics of being present at two events are workable, and the overall cost to send representation is not prohibitive with respect to typical donation levels. That being said, it is pretty tough to measure "inspiration", and to understand if adding an additional championship is both the best way to support raw growth, as well as a cost effective way to increase inspiration. Perhaps the right answer is to continue to leverage volunteers to increase the quality of "lesser" events, to push the district models harder, etc. I won't claim to know the right answer, but I will say that whatever makes FIRST grow and scale better, will probably be seen as favorable from a corporate sponsor standpoint.

[marshall]

Originally Posted by Cory

1.5x as many teams, right? 2x400 vs 1x600.

I have heard that key Championship Event sponsors were not made aware of this plan before we were, or consulted at all as to their thoughts on/ability to support two events. That seems like a huge problem.

Are you serious? With the level of commitment and funding that these companies provide, I can't believe they weren't consulted or at least it had to have been considered. The total cost for FIRST has to go up considerably for hosting two of these events. They have to have a plan for fundraising for them to cover the cost of hosting. At least, I hope they do.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by marshall

Are you serious? With the level of commitment and funding that these companies provide, I can't believe they weren't consulted or at least it had to have been considered. The total cost for FIRST has to go up considerably for hosting two of these events. They have to have a plan for fundraising for them to cover the cost of hosting. At least, I hope they do.

I suspect that the companies donating noticeable $ to FIRST will continue to let FIRST inspire students, without being the least bit interested in micromanaging how FIRST does it.

My very limited experience in that realm gives some weight to my opinion on the subject, but I'm not remotely close to an expert, and I never was a spokesman for any company.

[gblake]

While we are on the subject of statistics, I discovered something very interesting that was cleverly hidden in the blog post by someone forced to communicate their true message to us secretly!

The survey result percentages were 26, 11, 11, 7, 12, 4, 6, 7, 4, and 12.

If you combine those together to sum the full psychic power of all respondents, you get this sequence of numbers: 26, 37, 48, 55, 67, 71, 77, 84, 88, 100.

If you remove spaces from the first sentences of the blog post (because that is how these things are done), and then extract the 26th, 37th, 48th, ... 100th letters from the post you get: N F E T H I P I N A.

Once you have those letters it's immediately obvious that FIRST is trying to convey this to us: "THIN FE PAIN".

And what could that be, other than an unmistakable reference to the pain of being cut by a thin iron/steel blade???

So, unless you are one of the lemmings bumbling through life as one of the New World Order's Illuminatis' brainwashed proles , surely you understand that FIRST's real message to us (that they had to hide from their robotic overlords (whom I look forward to serving)) is this:

Cutting the Championship in half to form two new Championships is painful for them and for us; but it is a compromise they believe will be both valuable and necessary, given their mission, and the constraints they face.

Blake

[Ichlieberoboter]

Originally Posted by gblake

While we are on the subject of statistics, I discovered something very interesting that was cleverly hidden in the blog post by someone forced to communicate their true message to us secretly!

The survey result percentages were 26, 11, 11, 7, 12, 4, 6, 7, 4, and 12.

If you combine those together to sum the full psychic power of all respondents, you get this sequence of numbers: 26, 37, 48, 55, 67, 71, 77, 84, 88, 100.

If you remove spaces from the first sentences of the blog post (because that is how these things are done), and then extract the 26th, 37th, 48th, ... 100th letters from the post you get: N F E T H I P I N A.

Once you have those letters it's immediately obvious that FIRST is trying to convey this to us: "THIN FE PAIN".

And what could that be, other than an unmistakable reference to the pain of being cut by a thin iron/steel blade???

So, clearly, unless you are one of the lemmings bumbling through life with the rest of the masses who have been completely brainwashed by the Illuminati of the New World Order , surely you understand that FIRST's real message to us (that they had to hide from their robotic overlords) is this:

Cutting the Championship in half to form two new Championships is painful for them and for us; but it is a compromise they believe will be both valuable and necessary, given their mission, and the constraints they face.

Blake

That, my friend, is deep.

[216Robochick288]

Originally Posted by gblake

While we are on the subject of statistics, I discovered something very interesting that was cleverly hidden in the blog post by someone forced to communicate their true message to us secretly!

The survey result percentages were 26, 11, 11, 7, 12, 4, 6, 7, 4, and 12.

If you combine those together to sum the full psychic power of all respondents, you get this sequence of numbers: 26, 37, 48, 55, 67, 71, 77, 84, 88, 100.

If you remove spaces from the first sentences of the blog post (because that is how these things are done), and then extract the 26th, 37th, 48th, ... 100th letters from the post you get: N F E T H I P I N A.

Once you have those letters it's immediately obvious that FIRST is trying to convey this to us: "THIN FE PAIN".

And what could that be, other than an unmistakable reference to the pain of being cut by a thin iron/steel blade???

So, clearly, unless you are one of the lemmings bumbling through life with the rest of the masses who have been completely brainwashed by the Illuminati of the New World Order , surely you understand that FIRST's real message to us (that they had to hide from their robotic overlords) is this:

Cutting the Championship in half to form two new Championships is painful for them and for us; but it is a compromise they believe will be both valuable and necessary, given their mission, and the constraints they face.

Blake

....Half Life 3 confirmed?

[Deke]

Originally Posted by Holtzman

Another way of looking at these results is that 55% oppose two championships, 12% are neutral, and only 33% favor two championships. To me, that’s is a much more powerful statement about how the community really feels.

Originally Posted by Karthik

When I looked at the numbers, I immediately grouped the data into buckets.

Strongly oppose (ratings 1-3): 48%
Neutral (ratings 4-7): 29%
Strongly favour (ratings 8-10): 23%

I find both of these interesting, so I would like to expand on them:

1 vs 10 = 26 to 12 = 2.16:1 ratio
1-2 vs 9-10 = 37 to 16 = 2.31 ratio
1-3 vs 8-10 = 48 to 23 = 2.09 ratio
1-4 vs 7-10 = 55 to 29 = 1.90 ratio
1-5 vs 6-10 = 67 to 33 = 2.03 ratio

No matter how you slice the deck, for every one person approving the championsplit, there are two people opposing it.

[John]

Originally Posted by Infinity2718

I find both of these interesting, so I would like to expand on them:

1 vs 10 = 26 to 12 = 2.16:1 ratio
1-2 vs 9-10 = 37 to 16 = 2.31 ratio
1-3 vs 8-10 = 48 to 23 = 2.09 ratio
1-4 vs 7-10 = 55 to 29 = 1.90 ratio
1-5 vs 6-10 = 67 to 33 = 2.03 ratio

No matter how you slice the deck, for every one person approving the championsplit, there are two people opposing it.

This method isn't exactly fair either. In your first comparison, you are comparing the ratio of 25% of negative responses to 20% of positive. In your second it is 50% to 40%, and so on. In your last comparison, you count 5 (neutral) as negative.

What if we rescaled to a scale from 0 to 10? We can map the negative responses linearly to get the new responses. We replace 1 with 0, 2 with 1.25, 3 with 2.5, and 4 with 3.75. After performing the average based on this data, we get:

.26*0+.11*1.25+.11*2.5+.07*3.75+.12*5+.04*6+.06*7+ .07*8+.04*9+.12*10 = 4.06

This weights everything symmetrically. It keeps positive values positive, and negative values negative. However, I think it is still likely to be flawed, as someone who is approximately neutral might be more likely to lean towards the favorable side than negative simply because the positive side is larger. Someone who votes roughly neutrally based on the "center" of the scale may be unfairly counted as voting positively.

A better method might be to map the entire scale from 1-10 to 0-10. We replace 1 with 0, 2 with 1.111, 3 with 2.222, 4 with 3.333, 5 with 4.444, 6 with 5.555, 7 with 6.666, 8 with 7.777, and 9 with 8.888 (10 remains 10).

We now get:

.26*0+.11*1.111+.11*2.222+.07*3.333+.12*4.444+.04* 5.555+.06*6.666+.07*7.777+.04*8.888+.12*10 = 3.86

This scale is likely to be slightly biased towards negative, because it treats "neutral" according to the instructions as very slightly negative.

I think the true average, if the scale had been 0-10 instead of 1-10, would lie somewhere between these two numbers. In any case, they are closer to each other than they are to FIRST's number for the average (4.47).

There also are quite possibly some psychological effects that I have not accounted for. Do the numbers on the scale themselves affect how we vote? If given a poll, 1-5, and the average is 4, does this imply that if the same poll was conducted on a scale from 1-9, the average would be 7? This would be expected if people simply scaled their votes linearly (or at least, linearly on average) but that may not be the case.

If we remap the entire scale

[PAR_WIG1350]

Originally Posted by John

There also are quite possibly some psychological effects that I have not accounted for. Do the numbers on the scale themselves affect how we vote? If given a poll, 1-5, and the average is 4, does this imply that if the same poll was conducted on a scale from 1-9, the average would be 7? This would be expected if people simply scaled their votes linearly (or at least, linearly on average) but that may not be the case.

If we remap the entire scale

I have never found a study that confirms this, but I have heard it suggested that the widespread practice of using 75 as the 'center' of a 100 point grading scale in US schools has predisposed the people who attended those schools to center their rating on 75%, rather than on 50%. I feel that the most significant thing FIRST did correctly for this survey question was specifying a center, which I imagine would at least slightly help to fix that bias.

[evanperryg]

Originally Posted by PAR_WIG1350

I have never found a study that confirms this, but I have heard it suggested that the widespread practice of using 75 as the 'center' of a 100 point grading scale in US schools has predisposed the people who attended those schools to center their rating on 75%, rather than on 50%. I feel that the most significant thing FIRST did correctly for this survey question was specifying a center, which I imagine would at least slightly help to fix that bias.

Interesting idea, and definitely something that is very easily observed in day-to-day life. However, I think we are reading into these numbers a little too far. Any kind of mapping or analysis we make is based on a limited amount of information, just the numbers in the chart and the numbers pointed out in the blog post. Our own interpretations of the data will have our own biases, and each will have an inherent flaw of some kind. I wouldn't read into those numbers a whole lot; although they are obviously skewed, it proves one important point without any special interpretation: The number of people who strongly oppose the switch account for the number of "neutral" and "strongly favor" voters combined. That says something, regardless of how this poll may or may not have been intentionally weighted in favor of the poller's preference.

Originally Posted by gblake

I suspect that the companies donating noticeable $ to FIRST will continue to let FIRST inspire students, without being the least bit interested in micromanaging how FIRST does it.

Among the members of the FIRST board of directors and executive advisory board are executives from Boeing, JCPenny, Rockwell Collins, Qualcomm, BAE Systems, Rockwell Automation, and Lego, all major contributors to FIRST and FIRST teams. Even if the biggest contributors aren't "micromanaging," they definitely have a hand in the workings of FIRST.

Regardless of whether or not the poll was weighted, I believe FIRST will take into account at least some of the complaints we have made. These sort of heated protests happen every year, with every game release. Admittedly, the restructuring of champs has a much longer-term impact on the culture of FIRST, but change had to come at some point- it was inevitable. Sure, it would have been nice to know there were talks about major changes to the championship structure coming soon, but it's not like they didn't tell us something was going to change back in 2012. Again, it would have been nice to get some more specific info before the announcement, but it's not like they never said anything. At the end of they day, no matter how much we analyze, map, or dissect this poll, FIRST is going to change, and it has to change in order to become a universally-recognized program.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by evanperryg

...
Among the members of the FIRST board of directors and executive advisory board are executives from Boeing, JCPenny, Rockwell Collins, Qualcomm, BAE Systems, Rockwell Automation, and Lego, all major contributors to FIRST and FIRST teams. Even if the biggest contributors aren't "micromanaging," they definitely have a hand in the workings of FIRST.
...

I realize that you didn't disagree with me, so please notice in return that I'm not disagreeing with you.

Members of the FIRST Board of Directors, when they are carrying out their duties as Board Members, are not supposed to let their duties as members of any other organization bias them (their life experiences should give them wisdom that helps "inform" their decisions; but when they are carrying out board business, they are carrying out FIRST business, not the business of any other entity).

And, when they take their FIRST BoD hats off, those folks have bigger fish to fry, in their primary jobs.

Advising, setting goals, and contributing to high-level policy/strategy is what a good Board does, micromanaging is what a good board doesn't do.

Before we go off on a tangent - I'll claim that debating in CD whether the Championsplit is high-level policy, or a lower-level detail, won't be useful. If there is any confusion about that among the BoD members, or among the people who report to the BoD, they will straighten it out, on their own.

Blake