Bringing awareness of FIRST @ The workplace.

[Travis Hoffman]

Our PR department is very in tune with our team, and we receive great coverage throughout the year via Web articles. In addition, our director of engineering is the champion of FIRST in our division. He often issues requests among his underlings for technical mentor support on our behalf. We've also held numerous demos and brought team students in for "what the heck do you engineers do anyway?" days [no, we don't actually call it that]. Despite this and other efforts to recruit additional mentor support from within our facility, it has proven to be a mostly fruitless enterprise for about the past 5 years.....

On the other hand, we freely exploit the engineers' need for new gizmos and trinkets to decorate their Dilbertesque cubicles by selling Hexbugs and holding Chinese auctions at the facility throughout the year. So while most of my fellow Delphi divisional employees aren't putting any time into the team, they are at least contributing a lot of their hard earned cash to the effort.

[xitaqua]

Travis,

I think you bring a point that is often forgotten :

Bringing awareness of FIRST is a T.E.A.M efforts, it needs "Enterprise Coordination" where PR, Communications (Internal), executive sponsors and others are all aligned.

I think is always very cool when a senior executive at my company speaks at a regional and we get to see it on the company internal news.....it usually spark the interest of others....

Sometime it takes many "impressions" before someone get sold on FIRST Robotics, and the next step helping then figure out how to get involved and coordinate it within the organization.

Cheers,
Marcos.