Anyone here notice that it’s extremely difficult to contact a FIRST team in your area?
Sure, you can use the FIRST place to find the teams that operate around you, but actually reaching out those programs to open a dialog can be extremely challenging.
For me, I’ve become a bit of a pro at hunting down teams, but it’s not been easy. I have to really hope that a team has an active webpage with an active email address. However, if that doesn’t work out, which doesn’t most of the times, then I’m having to scour Chief Delphi, look through school webpages, or go through my existing FIRST contacts.
However, very recently I went through this process with someone who is new to FIRST. Someone who is looking to get involved and simply wasn’t sure how to reach a team, and frankly, it was embarrassing.
FIRST needs a way for people to be able to reliable contact FIRST teams, regardless of how established a team or its presence in social media.
I agree. I understand the need to keep contact information away from the public for privacy reasons, but having a forwarding email set up in TIMS that connects to a contact page on the first website would help with this. No names or personal contact info would need revealed, but you would still have a way to contact them.
This is actually extremely true, and I wish the FIRST community could try and improve in this aspect to better the amount of team members and getting more of those that are interested in robotics into robotics. I think each team should supply an email, Facebook, and Twitter on their website, all which they check daily. It doesn’t even have to be the teams official social media account, it can be any member who actively checks their accounts.
Reach out to your Regional Director or friendly FIRST Senior Mentor…in your case in Georgia your FSM is Linda Pham, lpham at usfirst.org. We can contact them for you, IF they are reading their emails. Lots of teachers don’t check school email accounts during the summer months and teams go dark for July/August.
I’ve encountered this same struggle. We host an offseason competition and 80% of the teams in our area don’t even know about it because there is zero contact information available to us online. I eventually just sent an email to our the director of our local regional who agreed to send an email blast to teams in the area.
I’ve heard that the TIMS main contact can look up other teams main contacts in TIMS (assuming that the other contacts have opted in). This helps team to team communication, but not outsiders.
Yes, this is true. And it’s also not accessible from the time Championship ends until FIRST decides to open it again for the following season. The downtime has gotten shorter in recent years, but it’s still a pain when you want to contact someone from XXXX team to ask them questions, but the one place you might be able to go to is not available for months on end.
I’m ok with the restricted access to team contact information, but it needs to be something that is available year-round.
While that’s true, there are a number of problems. It’s entirely possible that someone has both email and PM shut off, the most active poster hasn’t been around the team for a while or on CD for a while, etc. And, of course, not all teams are on CD.
Speaking of CD, I wonder if CD’s email system, or a derivation could be applied to FIRST’s site. All emails are site-generated, but don’t reveal email addresses unless a reply includes one.
Building a strong network in your community is not easy.
Getting to know you’re RDs and Senior Mentors helps. Another option is to hold events and sign people up for those events, you build a pretty good database pretty quickly.
I have even gone as far to just go around at regionals/off-seasons and ask teams to sign up on a list so we can contact them in the future.
I like the idea of a contact link on every team’s page. It should be simple enough to implement.
Quoted for truth. While I’ve been lucky enough to easily acquire the main contacts for all our area teams, sometimes they just don’t respond. We’re hosting an off-season in roughly a month and still quite a few STL area teams haven’t registered. Hopefully we see more of a response with school starting up, but it’s still surprising to me how hard it has been to get a response from some teams in our area.
If there is a VISTA in your area you can reach out to them as well.
Personally, before I became a VISTA I have reached to an out of state RD to find an FRC team near where my now husband was currently at. Him and others at his Navy command wanted to volunteer but didn’t know how to get in contact with a team near them.
One downside I see right away, capacity on the email servers. I’m no expert, but I would think that the servers have only so many email accounts, it’s a bandwidth issue?? Am I right? Experts…chime in here.
I’m not sure what you are getting at. usfirst.org is the domain name still used by the usfirst organization. Why wouldn’t that be the email address they would give out?