What is your team doing for Dean's Homework?

[cmh0114]

What is your team doing to make FIRST more well-known to the general public? Our team is doing its best, but I want to hear ideas to get the attention of even more people.

[Cynette]

Since Team 1511 is hosting a pre-ship scrimmage, our corprorate sub-team has been sending out press releases and we have Time-Warner Cable and several local newspapers coming to attend the event. We will use that event to hype up the Finger Lakes Regional and hopefully attract some of the public to the event.

Our challenge is in trying to figure out how to convince the other students of the High School to come. We would appreciate any ideas on how to attract them!

[rsisk]

We are going the alternative media route.

We had an open house and invited the online news site: http://www.swrnn.com/ to come by and check us out. Unfortunately we would never get this kind of coverage from our local paper anymore.

I have arranged for one of my favorite podcasts: http://evadot.com/ to attend the Virginia Regional and do a live podcast. All made arrangements with a team I know is going to be there to hook up with them for the podcast.

Invited Dr. Kiki Sanford from Dr. Kiki's Science Hour (part of the TWIT network) to attend the San Jose regional. I was listening to her last podcast co hosted by , Ariel Waldman, digital anthropologist and the founder of SpaceHack.org, and they were talking about wanting to learn how to build robots. What better place to learn than hangin' at a FIRST competition.

Printing tons of these Regional Competitions Handouts (they look like entry tickets) http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2309, to tell people about the regionals I am going to (San Diego, LA). They are cheap to make and easy to hand out. I give stacks to our team members to hand out too.

Lots of activity on Twitter talking about robots. This actually helped to encourage one of the execs at the company I work for (he follows me on Twitter) to ask me to help get his daughter on a team. Now I have one more allie in the company to help get it to support FIRST. It is so much fun watching someone's first exposure to FIRST

Started a FIRST Robotics group on LinkedIN; http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=..._ltod_requests and update regularly with FIRST robotics news. This was actually part of Dean's homework in 2008. We are getting near to 700 members.

Presenting any chance we get. We have a canned presentation that any of the team members can present in 4, 10, and 20 minute formats. All the text is there, all they have to do is read. We presented to the Riverside City Council on Jan 4th and now have the ears of our local leaders. Also worked with the Kiwanis for a couple of presentations and got invited to their annual Turkey BBQ where a ton of community leaders show up.

Hope this help spur some ideas.

[IKE]

I am working with a public events site that links up through Facebook and Twitter and some other alternative advertising. I am waiting on some approvals before I post up the links.

[Eragon301]

We have a twitter account so we can update people on the go as well as a facebook fan page. Both of them have widgets on our website so that people that are not on facebook or twitter can still see our updates.

[npinage]

Team 1023 just did our unveiling, we had the local newspaper, and FOX news there to film some of it. We also created the Super Nerds! group on facebook, that has rallied a lot of fans. At our schools winter pep rally, we were recognized, and showed off one the previous years robots to the school.

[Frank Grossman]

One of the things we noticed was difficlut is to tell people how to find a regional near them. So we created the site http://www.firstregionals.com

It has all the regionals on a google map and you can enter your zip code to find the regional event closest to you. Please feel free to link to it or send it out in emails or posts.

[IKE]

The other day I was pumping gas and was watching the little TV, and it told me I could submit events via its website so I checked it out.

We submitted all of the Districts and Regionals on a website called:

http://events.gstv.com/

Gas Station TV is the home of the commercials that you see on some of the TVs at Gas stations. They are also linked in through Twitter and Facebook. They accept community events and then review them. So far all of the US events are submitted (except Championship), and most have been approved.

example event:
http://events.gstv.com/event/3136

Please let me know if you see these pop up on the gas station TVs in your area. I was posting them in Chronilogical order, so week 4/5/6 should be up in a day or so. Also use the links as things to send to friends via Facebook.

For those of you doing fundraisers, this site is another bit of free advertising for your fund-raising events.

[Koko Ed]

Tonight the team is going to attend the Rochester City School District board meeting mainly to remind them that they promised us a new home. While there we are passing out invitations to the Finger Lakes Regional. The Superintendent has ahd previous experience in dealing with FIRST while he was in New York City but the board does not and while being homeless is daunting the other teams in the Rochester City School District need even more support and we hope this will help. It would be nice if the regional inspired them to support FIRST even more from Lego League to FRC and help to make it a priority for them.

[Gary Dillard]

It's kinda hard to get people fired up to drive 8 hours to come see you at a regional, or even to drive 4 hours to the closest event in Atlanta. However, today I was looking at some of the online "what to do" sites in New Orleans and didn't find anything at all about the Bayou Regional, so I submitted the information to their sites. Wish I had thought of doing that sooner - hopefully it makes it in.