Suffering from lack of sponsors

[JulieB]

How many teams don't have corporate sponsors?
Cause Team 538 is suffering from not having enough money.

[Marc P.]

Many threads like this have come and gone. The simple answer is there are many teams out there without corporate sponsors, and they all get by the same way- fund raising. There's a wealth of money to be had for those willing to work for it. Pancake breakfasts, ziti dinners, car washes, bake sales, auctions, tag sales are all great examples of ways to raise money. Search through the many fund raising threads to find some great ideas. If your team doesn't have enough money (and many teams feel they don't, getting by dollar by dollar every season), do something about it! Step up to the plate and organize some fundraisers if your team won't. Donations and sponsorships don't make up a team- the students do. The students have to be willing to keep the team alive, through whatever means necessary. If it means selling off some old junk in the garage, or offering services with all proceeds donated to the team, or just giving up time to think of ideas to raise money. There's almost always something that can be done about financial problems, it just may take some time to find!

[David V]

My team has no direct corporate sponsers. Georgia Tech does sponsor us though, and they get some corporate money. Too bad they don't give it all to us . Anyway, we're getting by this season by working at the Georgia Dome (where nationals is) for Papa Johns. Brings in about $1000 a session, about every other week. We also do carwashes which bring in about half that.

[colt527]

Ever since Keyspan stopped sponsoring all of the teams in the SBPLI regional, we have never had an official corperate sponsor. This year we lucked out and are getting anywhere from $1000-$4000 from Sports Illustrated (its good to know people, especially dads)(This is also nto an official corperate sponsor because my dad had to give money and then they tripple his donation and give it to us). Our school gives us $10,000, $5000 for the entrance and $5000 for the rest (except food and such, because pizza is kinda hard to order with purchase orders), so we have always had to do some sort of findraising. Candy sales have always been our main way of raising funds, we get about $200 - $400 depending on the amount of candy we well, and if we do that 3 times it comes out to about $1000 more dollars, most of which go into buying food, small parts and other things we need immediatly. We tried to sell doughnuts afterschool but we never got more then even because we wound up eating them all ourselves. Today we have a deal with Burger King where we get 20% of their profits for 3 hours (6-9) and we also tried to get people to go by offereing a raffle ticket for 50 dollars to best buy for a purchase of 10 dollars or more.

Our worst experiance with fundraising was trying to raffle off a protable DVD player in 1 month for 5$ a ticket. People in school just didnt carry around $5 dollars or were not willing to buy 1 for that amount. Its probably a better idea to offer something a little bit more valuable (cheap laptop?) for $1 a ticket and do it over the span of a few months. In our raffle we barely made it back to even and most tickets were purchased by members of the club.

[Kims Robot]

For any teams that need money, we have a fundraising page on our website that might be of help:
http://www.penfieldrobotics.com/page9.html

We are doing a patron drive this year, and this has the potential to bring in a lot of money, most especially through family/friend business connections. Anyone can download and modify the documents for their team.

We also have a list of other fundraising ideas on there, and hope to have supporting documentation up by the end of the year.

If anyone has any questions feel free to email or PM me. Good luck!!

[sanddrag]

We have no official corporate sponsors. Our main sponsor is our school which covers a little less than half the registration cost for our 1 event this year. The rest comes from a little bit here and there from individuals and small businesses and from fundraisers like candy sales.

[Yov]

what is a reasonable amount of extra money (anything above the registration fee) to have?

[Billfred]

Well, FIRST allowed in 2004 some $3500 for extra materials. Whether you spent all that or not is up to you. (Insert disclaimer here about this being from the 2004 rules and that everything can change for 2005 and blah blah blah.)

[Sam J.]

Yes, we are in the same situation. We still cannot figure out why Cisco Systems quit being our corporate sponsor after only 1 year with us, even after we won in the championships too. It is very aggravating to try and find a new sponsor in such a short amount of time. We have raised almost all the money we need in the last few years, so I know that it is possible. The reason we seem to be having more trouble year after year is mostly because of our school system creating limits on the number of fund raisers we are allowed to have.

[Doug G]

We've always struggled to get sponsorships. Our first year we borrowed $5000 from the student body funds at school and then paid it back over a year as we raised $$. It's depressing to get $100 sponsorships from local businesses (which for them is a lot) and it barely make a dent in your budget. The past few years we typically raise just $1500-$2000 over the comp fees. This is just enough to buy a few key parts and raw materials. Luckily we have a lot of left overs from previous years (chain, sprockets, gears, Victors...). We're almost finished with our raffle fundraiser which should bring in about $2000-$3000. This year we're raffling off a "Gadget Basket" that has a dig camera, MP3 player, Nintendo Gameboy Advanced, and $50 Gift Card. We've been selling tickets for $5 each for 6 weeks. Two years ago we raffled off a computer that was donated and cleared about $5000.

[NoodleKnight]

This year, so far, we have no real sponsors, although a company was nice enough to donate $1500 dollars, they gave us money last year too. Last year we were lucky to get a coorperate sponsorship of $10,000 from Oracle, that and we had our team members badger relatives for donations and such, plus anonymous donations and various other fundraising events left us with enough money to pay for registration this year.

Sam; Sometimes companies only give one sponsorship per group, it might be the case with Cisco Systems, as it is for us and Oracle.

[RoboMom]

Originally Posted by Yov

what is a reasonable amount of extra money (anything above the registration fee) to have?

Yov, this should be in a separate thread as it is an important topic. Do a search first to make sure there isn't an existing one to continue.
I have some suggestions, especially since you have some things that are going to be unique, but I want others to check in first. It would be especially useful for the Brazilian and UK teams to check in.

[rswsmay]

Originally Posted by JulieB

How many teams don't have corporate sponsors?
Cause Team 538 is suffering from not having enough money.

This is our 3rd year in the FIRST robotics program and as several other here have stated, we are struggling with funding and sponsors also. I realized that this would be a challenge for the team for this coming season back in March of this year. Unfortunately with the loss of most of last years students (being seniors) and all the school staff that participated (job transfers), we were unsure if there was going to be a team to participate this year.

Add to all this that most of the previous years sponsors have committed to support other programs, we are facing the possibility that we will be in the stands this year cheering other teams on.