How Does Your Team Recruit?

[Cynette]

We use absolutely any tool or method we can! We hope we get feeders from the FLL teams, but to add to that we attend the spring HS activity fair that is put on for the 8th graders. We attend freshman orientation meetings where we promote FIRST scholarships to hook Mom and Dad. We make commercials to show on morning announcements at the HS. We hang signs everywhere (school approved of course). We hold intoductory meetings where we serve free pizza and soda and ask the team members to bring friends and family members. We post the list of scholarships outside the guidance office. Our teacher advisors help us recruit. We also do a lot of activities to make us visible at the school: participating in pep rallys, hosting a blood drive, pizza and candy sales afterschool.

Once we recruit, our most difficult part had been retention (typically 30%), but this year we used a mock build season with vex robots and doubled our retention rate! By the time build season started we had 20 returning students and 18 new students!