[FRC Blog] Two Championship Survey Results and Path Forward

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by drwisley

I bet the engineering hours of our mentors being donated far exceed any of the green dollars spent by teams or sponsors. We're talking about the 'engineer's engineers' as well. Competing is fun, laughing at teenagers is also, but we could all be inventing or running side businesses with these hours.

If you're going to consider aggregate man hours donated, then FLL wins in a landslide. Even if you appraise an engineer's man hour higher than a teacher's or parent's, the quantity of FLL teams is an order of magnitude higher than FRC teams.

[drwisley]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

If you're going to consider aggregate man hours donated, then FLL wins in a landslide. Even if you appraise an engineer's man hour higher than a teacher's or parent's, the quantity of FLL teams is an order of magnitude higher than FRC teams.

That could be, but having coached both, most of my mentors could do meaningful work with the 3-7 hundred hours per year donated to FRC. Average FLL hours per mentor don't compare.

[drwisley]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

If you're going to consider aggregate man hours donated, then FLL wins in a landslide. Even if you appraise an engineer's man hour higher than a teacher's or parent's, the quantity of FLL teams is an order of magnitude higher than FRC teams.

Additionally, this is my very point, not FRC > FLL mentors, but that mentor engagement and motivation is the critical aspect of all STEM. Schools, sponsors and students have something tangible to be gained. The engineers can just as easily turn their hours into individual profit.

[ay2b]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Was this survey open to FLL and FTC teams? Was it advertised to them? How about sponsors (both team and event)?

FRC members are not the only stakeholders here.

Originally Posted by Cory

But we are the most visible and highest paying stakeholders here (by a wide margin). FIRST can pretend that doesn't matter... But it does.

I have to disagree with you, Cory. 600 teams at $5,000 each is only $3,000,000. I count 19 "strategic partners"; I believe I remember hearing that was a minimum of $1,000,000 contribution to be listed as such. There's an additional 10 "founding partners", which I suspect is an even larger contribution. That's roughly 10x the money that teams pay, and is only counting the two two tiers of sponsorship.

I'd have to say that the highest paying (by a wide margin) stakeholders are the sponsors.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by ay2b

I have to disagree with you, Cory. 600 teams at $5,000 each is only $3,000,000. I count 19 "strategic partners"; I believe I remember hearing that was a minimum of $1,000,000 contribution to be listed as such. There's an additional 10 "founding partners", which I suspect is an even larger contribution. That's roughly 10x the money that teams pay, and is only counting the two two tiers of sponsorship.

I'd have to say that the highest paying (by a wide margin) stakeholders are the sponsors.

I actually completely missed Sean's line about sponsors when I posted. I agree. FRC teams are not as big of a financial contributor to FIRST as the sponsors are.

However, I think if you polled all the sponsors they're probably not stoked that they get two chances to give their company air time...they're probably wondering how the hell they're going to make their steadily shrinking budgets for FIRST cover two events instead of one.

[jeremylee]

Originally Posted by Cory

I actually completely missed Sean's line about sponsors when I posted. I agree. FRC teams are not as big of a financial contributor to FIRST as the sponsors are.

However, I think if you polled all the sponsors they're probably not stoked that they get two chances to give their company air time...they're probably wondering how the hell they're going to make their steadily shrinking budgets for FIRST cover two events instead of one.

This worries me even more. I don't see 2 "championships" bringing in much for additional sponsorship dollars, but I do see significant cost associated with putting on a 2nd "championship".

[ay2b]

Originally Posted by Cory

I think if you polled all the sponsors they're probably not stoked that they get two chances to give their company air time...they're probably wondering how the hell they're going to make their steadily shrinking budgets for FIRST cover two events instead of one.

Originally Posted by jeremylee

This worries me even more. I don't see 2 "championships" bringing in much for additional sponsorship dollars, but I do see significant cost associated with putting on a 2nd "championship".

Previously FIRST was selling the sponsors the ability to reach 600 teams at 1 event. Now FIRST is selling the ability to reach twice as many teams. I'm sure that if a company wants to buy advertising at ("sponsor") only one event, they can, but of course FIRST would encourage them to do both.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by ay2b

Previously FIRST was selling the sponsors the ability to reach 600 teams at 1 event. Now FIRST is selling the ability to reach twice as many teams. I'm sure that if a company wants to buy advertising at ("sponsor") only one event, they can, but of course FIRST would encourage them to do both.

1.5x as many teams, right? 2x400 vs 1x600.

I have heard that key Championship Event sponsors were not made aware of this plan before we were, or consulted at all as to their thoughts on/ability to support two events. That seems like a huge problem.

[Steven Smith]

From a personal standpoint and as a mentor, I have one opinion on the championship split, and I've expressed that in other posts.

However, I also have some visibility into the sponsor side, so I'll speak to my knowledge there. I'm not an official spokesman of company policy, but since I got involved with FIRST, I've been more involved with the circles where decisions are made regarding educational donations and have lobbied for more support for FIRST.

I see sponsorship dollars (at least at the Fortune 500 corporation level) as being a bit more flexible, with the ability to flex up to account for program growth.

Over $500 billion is spent annually on pre-K to 12th grade education in the US by government. At my company alone, we averaged ~$30M/year (2009-2014) in education related donations. Of course, I advocate for FIRST to get a bigger piece of the pie, but there are a lot of great organizations out there all trying to solve the workforce development problem in unique ways. I quote these numbers simply to say that FIRST is still quite small relatively speaking, and the available funding for education is quite large. If FIRST could truly solve all the educational problems by just throwing more money at it, I suspect it would have happened already. For the FIRST model to work though, you need volunteer/mentor growth in conjunction with funding. If ~200,000 FIRST volunteers averaged 50 hours a year, and it would take $25/hr incentive pay to pull in new volunteers by just throwing money at it, you need ~$250M/yr to double the size of FIRST (assuming doubled need of volunteers). On top of that, the existing volunteers might be a little miffed the new ones are getting paid and they aren't. Sponsor money is important, but volunteerism is the key to growth IMHO.

I think that if FIRST can continue to scale, continue to meet the objectives companies want in terms of increasing the quality and quantity of qualified students entering the workforce, increase its reach/availability to historically underrepresented groups in engineering, etc... funding for the program will continue to grow. We're also very much interested in growing our volunteer base, as employees that are passionate about mentoring, their communities, etc., often bring that passion to work, as well as provide positive representation of the company.

We don't really spend a lot of time talking in terms of "marketing/advertising" opportunities at championship(s). The discussion is typically more of "how can we be most efficient with our donated dollars". Do we fund program A or program B? Who has shown they can do more with less and spend our grant money wisely. There is also the consideration of supporting our employees. If they choose to volunteer with an organization, it increases our confidence in said organization, so we want to back their efforts with additional funds.

As this all relates to championships and the championship split (sorry for rambling)... if it results in an increased student experience and supports growth, it will probably be seen as a positive change. The logistics of being present at two events are workable, and the overall cost to send representation is not prohibitive with respect to typical donation levels. That being said, it is pretty tough to measure "inspiration", and to understand if adding an additional championship is both the best way to support raw growth, as well as a cost effective way to increase inspiration. Perhaps the right answer is to continue to leverage volunteers to increase the quality of "lesser" events, to push the district models harder, etc. I won't claim to know the right answer, but I will say that whatever makes FIRST grow and scale better, will probably be seen as favorable from a corporate sponsor standpoint.

[marshall]

Originally Posted by Cory

1.5x as many teams, right? 2x400 vs 1x600.

I have heard that key Championship Event sponsors were not made aware of this plan before we were, or consulted at all as to their thoughts on/ability to support two events. That seems like a huge problem.

Are you serious? With the level of commitment and funding that these companies provide, I can't believe they weren't consulted or at least it had to have been considered. The total cost for FIRST has to go up considerably for hosting two of these events. They have to have a plan for fundraising for them to cover the cost of hosting. At least, I hope they do.

[gblake]

While we are on the subject of statistics, I discovered something very interesting that was cleverly hidden in the blog post by someone forced to communicate their true message to us secretly!

The survey result percentages were 26, 11, 11, 7, 12, 4, 6, 7, 4, and 12.

If you combine those together to sum the full psychic power of all respondents, you get this sequence of numbers: 26, 37, 48, 55, 67, 71, 77, 84, 88, 100.

If you remove spaces from the first sentences of the blog post (because that is how these things are done), and then extract the 26th, 37th, 48th, ... 100th letters from the post you get: N F E T H I P I N A.

Once you have those letters it's immediately obvious that FIRST is trying to convey this to us: "THIN FE PAIN".

And what could that be, other than an unmistakable reference to the pain of being cut by a thin iron/steel blade???

So, unless you are one of the lemmings bumbling through life as one of the New World Order's Illuminatis' brainwashed proles , surely you understand that FIRST's real message to us (that they had to hide from their robotic overlords (whom I look forward to serving)) is this:

Cutting the Championship in half to form two new Championships is painful for them and for us; but it is a compromise they believe will be both valuable and necessary, given their mission, and the constraints they face.

Blake

[Ichlieberoboter]

Originally Posted by gblake

While we are on the subject of statistics, I discovered something very interesting that was cleverly hidden in the blog post by someone forced to communicate their true message to us secretly!

The survey result percentages were 26, 11, 11, 7, 12, 4, 6, 7, 4, and 12.

If you combine those together to sum the full psychic power of all respondents, you get this sequence of numbers: 26, 37, 48, 55, 67, 71, 77, 84, 88, 100.

If you remove spaces from the first sentences of the blog post (because that is how these things are done), and then extract the 26th, 37th, 48th, ... 100th letters from the post you get: N F E T H I P I N A.

Once you have those letters it's immediately obvious that FIRST is trying to convey this to us: "THIN FE PAIN".

And what could that be, other than an unmistakable reference to the pain of being cut by a thin iron/steel blade???

So, clearly, unless you are one of the lemmings bumbling through life with the rest of the masses who have been completely brainwashed by the Illuminati of the New World Order , surely you understand that FIRST's real message to us (that they had to hide from their robotic overlords) is this:

Cutting the Championship in half to form two new Championships is painful for them and for us; but it is a compromise they believe will be both valuable and necessary, given their mission, and the constraints they face.

Blake

That, my friend, is deep.

[216Robochick288]

Originally Posted by gblake

While we are on the subject of statistics, I discovered something very interesting that was cleverly hidden in the blog post by someone forced to communicate their true message to us secretly!

The survey result percentages were 26, 11, 11, 7, 12, 4, 6, 7, 4, and 12.

If you combine those together to sum the full psychic power of all respondents, you get this sequence of numbers: 26, 37, 48, 55, 67, 71, 77, 84, 88, 100.

If you remove spaces from the first sentences of the blog post (because that is how these things are done), and then extract the 26th, 37th, 48th, ... 100th letters from the post you get: N F E T H I P I N A.

Once you have those letters it's immediately obvious that FIRST is trying to convey this to us: "THIN FE PAIN".

And what could that be, other than an unmistakable reference to the pain of being cut by a thin iron/steel blade???

So, clearly, unless you are one of the lemmings bumbling through life with the rest of the masses who have been completely brainwashed by the Illuminati of the New World Order , surely you understand that FIRST's real message to us (that they had to hide from their robotic overlords) is this:

Cutting the Championship in half to form two new Championships is painful for them and for us; but it is a compromise they believe will be both valuable and necessary, given their mission, and the constraints they face.

Blake

....Half Life 3 confirmed?

[Deke]

Originally Posted by Holtzman

Another way of looking at these results is that 55% oppose two championships, 12% are neutral, and only 33% favor two championships. To me, that’s is a much more powerful statement about how the community really feels.

Originally Posted by Karthik

When I looked at the numbers, I immediately grouped the data into buckets.

Strongly oppose (ratings 1-3): 48%
Neutral (ratings 4-7): 29%
Strongly favour (ratings 8-10): 23%

I find both of these interesting, so I would like to expand on them:

1 vs 10 = 26 to 12 = 2.16:1 ratio
1-2 vs 9-10 = 37 to 16 = 2.31 ratio
1-3 vs 8-10 = 48 to 23 = 2.09 ratio
1-4 vs 7-10 = 55 to 29 = 1.90 ratio
1-5 vs 6-10 = 67 to 33 = 2.03 ratio

No matter how you slice the deck, for every one person approving the championsplit, there are two people opposing it.

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by jeremylee

This worries me even more. I don't see 2 "championships" bringing in much for additional sponsorship dollars, but I do see significant cost associated with putting on a 2nd "championship".

Every previous Championship location has results in corporations based in the area contributing as sponsors. Coca-Cola was a giant presence in Atlanta, Monsanto in St. Louis, Disney in Orlando, etc. I suspect we'll see similar in Houston and Detroit.