From Bill's Blog: Merits of replacing bronze participation medals

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by Madison

That would be fine and, in such a case, I don't think it's too much to expect that FIRST or Bill added, "Savings here will offset escalating costs elsewhere." More detail would be nice, but it's certainly not necessary.

Indeed, some measure of scale would be beneficial. If FIRST paid the price we pay ($12, as I recall from the order form that seems to have been taken offline) for each of those medals, and each of the 1,677 teams that competed received a box of 25, we're into a half-million dollars in medals ignoring the cost of trucking all of those boxes all over the continent (and beyond, in a few cases). That said, I would be shocked if FIRST was paying that (read on).

Now, since I don't know FIRST's medal supplier, we'll have to approximate. A bit of Google work seems to indicate that custom medals of the size (3", by my measurement) and quantity FRC used this year would run anywhere from $2 to $4. Similar Googling suggests that really nice pins in similar quantity come in around $0.75 to $1, depending on the size FIRST settled on.

If FIRST had ordered for 1,700 teams, a $1 drop in unit price would be a $42,500 swing. Total FRC operating expenses for FY08 (according to their financials (PDF link)) were $20,558,122. Cutting $42,500 out of that would be approximately a 0.2% reduction in expenses.

To emphasize, every figure other than the one taken from FIRST's financial statement is an educated guess on my part. Draw from this what you will.