This season my team had about 12 people. Half of us are seniors and won’t be here next year. My team is mostly made up of two schools that have a combined 3000-ish kids, and each school has a STEM EFE class(One has electronics and robotics, the other has an IT class). We didn’t worry about it too much last year because we only have one mentor, but it looks like we are starting to grow and get some more help. I feel like we are at a point where we can start focusing on recruiting people, and I know there are a lot of people who would be interested if they could see what we actually do. I have a few things I plan to do. I plan to make a discord server people can join and ask questions that other students, mentors, or alumni can answer. I also plan to talk to the electronics and robotics teacher about bringing in the robot to show students what we really do at robotics. In the future(probably when I graduate from college) I plan on coming back and helping start an ftc team(there are 4 middle schools in my district and only one school has an ftc team), but that is not an option right now. Does anyone have any suggestions for ways to recruit people?
Does either school have club recruitment events for incoming students? If so, you should make it routine to go to it and get signups.
Because of being a community team we usually use social media to recruit students. We get applications via google forms ( this form does not have hard questions, just for understand the interest of student to FIRST)
After applications, we interview with students and after that they join us.
Different way to recruit more student, we go to high schools which do not have any robotic club for make a presentation of our team.
We also use discord server for education and communication.
Our priorities for applications are interest and free time for robotics.
We got 258 applications with this strategy just in 3 years
I am not sure about the other school, but at my school it is really hard to get clubs started or advertised unless a trusted teacher is going to do it all (on their own time without pay)because the principal only really supports sports. We have been trying to get esports running for like 7 years but everything gets shut down. The principal at the other school is a lot more open to things like this, so we could probably advertise it there.
449 demos the robot at school events, and also gives pitches to students in tech classes and on the morning announcements. That along with word-of-mouth seems to attract a healthy student population.
The student base is actually really mindful of recruiting (it is a student-run team), and has made effective efforts over the past few years to increase the number of students on the team from outside of the school’s magnet program.
We’re just coming off our Rookie year, and have been building the airplane as it’s been taking off and in flight. 
That said, there are a few things we did that appear to be working so far.
One surprising bump we got was from livestreaming the Orlando regionals on monitors throughout the school. That generated a lot of buzz, and we saw an uptick in participation right afterwards.
The team is offering a Summer camp for 6-8th graders, which is nearly full. This serves as fundraiser, outreach, and recruitment tool for the school (we’re a magnet HS) all in one.
During a recent orientation night for next year’s freshmen, the team demoed the robot and talked up FRC. We also announced a 2-day “boot camp” for new team members to take place right before school resumes. We’ve already got over a half-dozen signups after a few days of advertising it on the team website. Everyone’s really excited about having the opportunity to begin teaching our new members the skills they’ll need to be successful during the build season.
The last thing has to do with our team’s structure. Team leaders are primarily Juniors by design. The expectation is that our rising Seniors focus on teaching and advising the next leadership team, grooming Freshmen and Sophomores to take on more responsibility each year. We’ll see how that strategy goes, but everyone’s onboard and it appears to be working out so far.
We have a few younger siblings who are joining and they will probably get some friends to join. I also know some other younger people that I could try to recruit, but everyone that I know is the younger sibling so that strategy won’t work forever. I think we are covered for next year or two, but I am worried about what will happen after our younger siblings graduate.
Our school has an “Activity Fair” in September for all of the extracurricular activities to promote themselves and recruit new members which is a great starting point. Our school also has weekly video announcements for things going on around school that is shown during our homeroom period on Fridays and we have them mention our robotics team a few times before build season and where/when to go if somebody is interested in checking out the team.
If you are a community team as is suggested by currently pulling students from multiple schools, I would lean in to the advantages this brings. Bringing a robot out for demonstrations is a sure way to get some exposure for your team, as well as build some excitement around “robots”. I would also encourage you to look for existing robotics/stem programs in your area (especially age groups below frc), and try to build a relationship with them. These organizations already have a group of people who are predisposed to stem programs and your team might offer something new to these people.
78 is a community frc team and we love the advantages it brings. We have students from lots of different schools/homeschools and we do demos at many, as well as other events. We also have fll programs that help build a pipeline of students that are a part of our organization for many years which seriously helps in sustainability. You don’t actually need to start/run these type of feeder programs, but if they exist already you should lean into them.
We do a bunch of recruiting things which I will list below, however by a large margin, the majority of kids on our team came via a sibling or an existing friend they had who was already on the team (via band or scouts or a church group or a sport or just being neighbors or whatever).
Recruiting:
- Our students help mentor most of the FLL teams in town, helping build those personal relationships that bring in kids.
- We put up flyers around town and in the various high and middle schools in the county (we are a county-wide 4H team).
- Our kids talk to teachers about possible recruits (and not just the industrial arts teachers!)
- We put up flyers around town
- Social media & youtube.
- Outreach events (see below)
Then the second phase is summer “camps” (prototyping, CAD, manufacturing, programming, controls, etc). These are designed to engage the kids we attracted in the first phase AND for us to judge who will be an engaged member once build/comp season starts. If you want to be considered for the team in the fall you have to have completed at least one summer camp AND have attended at least one outreach event.
Some of our typical summer outreach events:
- County Fair
- State Fair
- STEM day at the Science Center
- 4th of July parade
- The school district’s summer enrichment program
- sponsor visits
And sometimes we just do “odd” stuff. One year a local model rocketry club needed some volunteers for a demonstration day, so we helped with that (our kids loved that too!). And so on.
Our school also has an activity fair. We bring our past season robot and show it off, which really helped a lot. We got about 30ish sign-ups if I remember correctly
We got a fair amount of sign ups this season from ours as well, I don’t have the exact numbers but it made up a decent amount of our new freshmen and sophomore members.
I’d recommend trying to talk to classes of younger kids because there’s usually a good amount of people interested in robotics but don’t necessarily know how to get involved
When I said club recruitment, I meant same as the activity fair. They do one first day of school when only freshmen students are there during their lunch. Usually we get most signups then.
It doesn’t bring in older members, so you could arrange talking to classes or have flyers for older students.
We usually ask students about other students they know would be good or interested in robotics, and have them ask in person to invite them. We try to get each student to come up with one, whether someone in their classes, a friend, or sibling.
If they don’t ask in person, we also have sent “owl letters” in the past to students to invite them to check our team out. We usually try to get a list of students through other students, but also possibly through teachers or counselors that may know which students would be good fits.
Consider that FRC is a sport in every sense if the word.
Younger FIRST programs! While this won’t instantly help you for the next year, setting up feeder FLL Challenge and Explore teams creates a student pipeline where kids are getting the STEM bug early on. About 1/2 of our students have prior FIRST experience before joining our team.
Other than that, we find word of mouth between friends to be very effective.
Word of mouth between friends and visiting my old team’s shop as an 8th grader is what resulted in me convincing my parents why driving an extra 15 minutes to the other high school in the area was worth it Otherwise, some events 3128 demo’d at/used to gain traction with incoming and current HS students included:
- Driving our robot at our school’s bi-annual pep rally
- Occasionally demoing at sports events, when invited i.e a womens soccer game with our biggest rivals and a womens water polo game where one of our team members was competing
- Attending the club fair
- Attending readiness days before school where people came to school to turn in forms
- Attending an activies fair night for incoming 8th graders
- Hosting our summer camp for grades K - 6 (previously also 7 - 8 but this is the first year back since COVID)
- Outreach events at local elementary/middle schools and engineering festivals around time i.e Greater San Diego Engineering Festival and previously, Maker Faire (RIP)
Typically the robot we demo is from the past/current year’s game. For sports games, we repurposed the 2017 bot we made, attached some yard sticks and attached butcher paper to each side cheering on our schools mascot.
The team has ballooned in size since I’ve graduated, even despite COVID, which has been impressive. It would be great to have feeder teams but most of the FLL teams I knew in the area came and went since they were community-based. Otherwise, building a FIRST pipeline would also help get some experience under incoming members’ belts before they started FRC.
Our team is based out of Sunnyvale, CA and is a community team. We are actively recruiting and if you or someone you know is looking for a team please reach out to [email protected].
Thanks,
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