Hey guys,
So we just started planning for the summer months. One of our biggest activities is gonna be fundraising. We have some decent connections and a lot of time and enthusiasm, so what do you think a reasonable fundraising target for a small team would be? (This is from a build guys perspective, the number is still a little bit up in the air ATM.)
Thanks,
Henry
Hate to give you more of an assignment than an answer, but the best starting point isn’t to pick a number to shoot for… it’s to build a budget for what your team needs and wants.
If the majority of your fundraising is small donations from individual donors (set up a booth type thing)… they probably won’t care as much what your financial situation is. However, having your budget paperwork in order and being able to communicate clearly what you intend to spend the donation on will go a long way when approaching sponsors.
A few good starting points for “needs” would be enough money to attend a single regional (with reasonable assumptions on grant money you are likely to get), enough budget on the robot materials to not overly limit your design potential by lack of funds, and shop consumables. Your “wants” you can prioritize as a team, including additional regionals or a contingency for championships, spirit items, food for the team, workshop upgrades, pit upgrades, etc. Many of those things are sensitive to the team size as well.
To give you a number though (complete opinion, YMMV), $10K is probably a good target for a new(ish) team of 10-20 students to make sure they are surviving… $15K-$20K gets thing to be a bit more comfortable… and if you’re targeting $25K+, make sure you’ve got a solid plan for how to spend your money wisely… versus just consuming $$$. As nice as it might be to have a $50K+ year, you don’t want to follow that with a $10K year… and after buying a $40K mill because all the cool teams have one, you can’t afford to go to champs.
A brainchild of one of our team members and parents, CIS 4607 started doing a Garage sale last fall. We put out a notice in our local paper and asked for used goods donations. We asked people to donate and we would then sell them at a very reasonable price and the unsold items were to be donated.
We were overwhelmed by the outpour of support. We then set up the garage sale as a “Pay what you think it is worth” style of sale. This did two things for the team - it saved on time tagging the items, and it allowed people that wanted the items to pay what they wanted or could pay for them.
People were actually overpaying for what the items were worth. And people that may not have had the funds to pay were able to ‘purchase’ the items for free.
It was a hit raising $1000 in a day. We are doing it again this fall.
Another cool thing you guys could do is simply volunteering to get your team name out there. (Yes, it sounds lame, just follow me here.) Our school’s JROTC ( I think that’s what they are called, my apologies ) usually volunteers at Team Ortho marathon events, and sometimes is even paid to go to these events to help out due to lack of volunteers. My math teacher/student council advisor told me about this opportunity and I really hope we are able to do it. Here’s a link.
As for ideas on how to fundraise: My brother, a senior, wants to do a dunk tank with the seniors on our team. When fundraising, it’s best to make yourself stick out! Buying cookie dough from a catalog gets lame fast (and who doesn’t like dunk tanks). Also, during the school year we almost had a Cold Water Challenge-Esque fundraiser but it didn’t really execute due to lack of planning.
Team 3313 Mechatronics has a great business plan with a budget, that’s the base for our business plan currently. You can also assign rewards for sponsors in a tiered fashion that way. 
Team 1802 does not have a set amount they try to fundraise over the summer months. Instead it is used as time to do team building With returning members and new recruits while getting our name out and doing some fundraising. Makers faire is a great thing to attend if they have one in your area. County fairs area great place as well.
As for fundraising our longest one and a large focus of the summer is a garage sale. We have a building donated to us to store items and hold the sale there. In return we do some minor upkeep on the property. All items are collected from people in and around our community. We pass out flyers that we will pick up unsold items after garage sales home completed or that people just want to donate. Those who donate get a donation reciept so they can claim it on their taxes. This viturally is free money as we do not have much invested in it besides labor and water. Normally we can get $2,000 to $3,000 from this. We also do nights a Chic-fil-a where a portion of the nights income is donated to us. This normally isn’t a big money maker but any little bit counts. There is also a wide variety of food places that do this.
Definitely come up with a budget. Your coaches should have a good idea of the average expenditures for your team. A rough example might be:
5,000 - registration
5,000 - Robot parts
1,000 - PR/Team supplies
5,000 - Travel
3,000 - Second event registration
etc…
Once you have your base budget, you can start looking at additional items. For example develop a “wish list” of tooling - once you have your basic budget covered, you can raise money specifically for your wish list. You might also have a wish list for projects. Want to try swerve drive out in the off season? Figure out how much it’s going to cost (buying swerve modules/raw materials if you’re making them yourself, control system components, robot frame, etc) and fund raise specifically for that project!
You also want to start some savings for the team. My team has always managed to bring in a little more than we’ve spent, and as a result paying for champs this year wasn’t all that bad - we got a little more from existing sponsors, and didn’t have to do any major fundraising effort for it.
One good thing you can do is find a major company willing to sponsor your team. It may take longer, and more effort than other fundraising paths, but big companies can provide a variety of resources for teams. (not all of them money) Plus they’ll usually continue sponsoring your team year after year. You just need to keep good relations with your sponsor.
Quick comment on this: If you can, you want to build up enough for registration for the next year in your savings. (The “if you can” refers more to “if the school bureaucracy will let you without taking some or all of it”, BTW.) That way, if for some reason you have a really bad year fundraising, you can at least field a robot the next year from a financial standpoint. Now, raising that all at once might be an issue, but you can build up to it.
As suggested, create a budget and know what you’re going to spend money on. Teams can operate on a huge range of budget amounts.
That being said, as a rough starting point (and fairly ambitious goal) I would start with $20,000. That’s one robot (comfortably), two events, a few people traveling, and other miscellaneous purchases. Many relatively competitive teams operate on less than this. If you’re going to only one event then you’re looking at the $10,000-$15,000 range. I strongly advise going to two regionals. The improvement from your first event to your second is unbelievable.
With some good corporate sponsors these amounts are fairly easy to get if you’re willing to talk to companies around you. Offering to have the students make a 5-10 minute presentation about your team to these companies is a good idea (as well as robot demonstrations).
Obligatory disgruntled comment about underestimating the difficulty here. OP, if you are going to be pursuing corporate sponsorship in earnest I can PM you some of the stuff we learned this year about the difficulties and successful approaches you can take. My team certainly aren’t pros just yet but I know a whole bunch of stuff that doesn’t work 
That would be great! Any help is greatly appreciated.