Big or Small?

[Ricky Q.]

Alright, so we really don't have one huge corporate sponsor that we get our money, this year we are getting $6000 from the school (a first ) and $5000 (hopefully) from Quest (see link in sig) and the rest come from other companies, last year we had about 20-30 minor sponsor's with smaller donations, and we fundraised...so my question is:

Is it better to get all your money from one huge sponsor, or split it up?

I personally think that splitting it up is good, for 3 reasons I can think of right now

a) If one company backs out, you still have others to go to, whereas if you get $100,000 from Company X, and they go under you have nothing and are left scrambling.

b) You can get more students involved, because you have to go out and look for your funds, and you can come up with more creative ways of making money, cause it all isnt there for you to go swimming in....For example, One nite we we're practicing at the old storefront we got to use, we sent 3 girls out in the parking lot with a box, they came back in 3 hours later with $350, that was awesome

c) You can get more companies in your community aware / involved with FIRST, the more money you need the more companies hear about it, plus they fill up your shirts more

Those are just my thoughts, vote and post!

[sanddrag]

Where exactly does the $6000 from your school come from? What category of the school budget does it fall into and where does it come from in the first place?

[Ricky Q.]

Originally posted by sanddrag
Where exactly does the $6000 from your school come from? What category of the school budget does it fall into and where does it come from in the first place?

Well this year it was supposed to come from the Extracirrucular Budget, but they somehow forgot to budget it, so it was scrapped up from other funds in the district, this is the first year we have bee supported financially by our district, so we are happy....in following years in will come from the Extracirrucular Budget.

[Rob Colatutto]

our school gives us money to, i don't know where they fit in into the budget though. i don't complain

[Chris Nowak]

I would say go with one or two big sponsors then get some smaller ones (like in the 4-10k range) just so your team doesn't get the shaft if the big one dies. Big corporations need to be very careful of their money these days, so It'd probably be good to have a backup (you should probably get more sponsors even if you don't need it).

Heh...we get zero from our school. Even our mentor/teachers dont get paid extra while sports coaches gets a lot extra. This year we are gonna be strapped for cash cuz our main sponsor gave us like a 20% pay cut. Also, our proposal for our $1200 animation computer got nixed, so im not very happy. I just hope Donnelly, who we also got to sponsor us, will give us some concrete support.

[Jon K.]

We have a main sponsor United Technologies Research Center who gives us quite a bit of money and then we have smaller sponsors like Nerac.com and a few others. So if we lose UTRC which may happen soon the way things are going over there we will be scrambling for cash. And none of the schools in any of the 3 towns that has team members give us money. The only hting they have given us besides many headaches last year was our Championship Jackets.

[Katie Reynolds]

We get a lot of money form our school district (not at liberty to say how much) and then from Plexus picks up a few of our costs (spare parts, etc) and pays the way for their engineers to go to competitions.

- Katie

[Aaron Lussier]

My team only has one sponsor that gives us a boat load of money, but I think it would be better to have many small sponsors just in case one of them dropped or they could not give you the money for some reason

[sidewinder]

GM ........................................ all i gotta say, obseen amount of money. But the only problem i see with having a huge sponser is that u become tied up in other matters, and basically become a way to show off your company's brand, rather than work together with engineers to learn how to build. As a Gm team, as many other teams can agree with, we have expectations put on ourselves and even more the preformance of our robot.

[sanddrag]

We don't have any sponsors big or small. :sigh: And I have no idea how we're going to make it. Everyone was slacking off while we had the NASA grant but now it's gone and we have no money.

I think it's really ashame that the amount of money you have determines how "pro" your team is. C'mon now, is that the spirit of FIRST? Is this what FIRST Robotics is coming too? We have to do something.


/me wants FIRST Robotics to be less expensive.

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