The title explains it all, How do you sustain fundraising? We seem to be either feast or famine. We have never been able to raise a ton of money. Our average is usually about 8-10k per year from grants and fundraising, which barely covers registration costs. We apply for every grant we can; however, we are not eligible for many of the grants on the FRC website. The one grant that we rely heavily on each year just slashed our award in half due to our free and reduced lunch numbers dropping.
What advice can you give? We have reached out to multiple businesses, made a presentation to the Chamber of Commerce, applied for grants, etc., and with the exception of one grant we have largely been ghosted. It’s extremely frustrating. We love competing in FRC, but I’m afraid we will not be able to continue in the future due to the increases in cost from FRC and increases in travel costs. It’s doubly frustrating when a neighboring state is in a district and gets 2 competitions for the price of our one, but that’s an entire other issue.
My advice is to aim for larger fundraisers that are doable rather than frequent small fundraisers. These seem more sustainable, like we help with a fish fry and a corn maze. Some teams can do very large fundraisers but we hit a limit in what is sustainable for us, so just do the largest ones you can manage each year, and always check that they pay well enough to continue.
Keep writing grants. I’d also seek any local foundations, like see if any of the local banks have trust/grant officers that administer them. Or check the local paper to see if other organizations have received money. Our local grant has been a real benefit to us and has increased some over the years.
Keep looking for a sponsor and business donations. The small donors definitely help but it is hard to sometimes go back yearly, so keep looking for someone that wants to be a bigger sponsor. This is also our weakest area. One thing that has helped is to organize business tours, which we’ve done 1-2x a year to the various businesses. It serves the two purposes in letting students see what companies do and letting them see you for possible sponsoring.
Two big aspects to our presentations which go beyond the clear ask for funding are:
(1) Bring a breakdown of costs. Explain why there is such a big ask and clearly lay out what is needed to run your program. I think you are already doing this from what you mentioned.
(2) The return on investment. While FRC is not a revenue generating venture for most, this is a good long term investment for businesses in the STEM fields. If you have any alumni to feature from the program who are currently working in a STEM field or survey data to convey how many alumni are currently studying or working in STEM fields, that is a good selling point to invest in the program.
I love that you’re reaching out for support from the community. Look at the presentation from the perspective of the potential sponsor. Why would they want to sponsor you? What are they getting from this?
Most often the answer is advertising in the short term and future workforce in the long term.
You are going to get a ton of advice but one thing many people tend to forget is that you can never get complacent. To be frank, sponsors come and go. A good relationship with one or more foundations is a more stable path, but individual companies in this day and age are all too prone to being acquired by corporations who are, shall we say, less invested in your community. I look back at our early days sponsors and see several of this sort, Cray Research being the most notable.
So you need to always, always be looking for more options.
I’ve got more advice but will clear the deck for others for a bit.
Not sure if you are a school or community team, but after much lobbying our biggest sponsor as of 2020 is now the school (>$50K). If you haven’t already, or even if you have, I would vote for continued pressure from your team on why this program is so great, and how it benefits your students, school, and community to get them to give you some sort of base line funding. Find out when your Board of Education meets and start attending, ask do to some presentations for them on your stats, like how many of your students get scholarships, have switched from not attending to college to attending, etc. List out all your community service the team does, talk about how investments in equipment can help out the technology classes during the day, etc. What’s great about this approach is (imo) easier to sustain then other sponsors and fundraising.
Collect information from Parents, Mentors, Alumni about where they work. Parents may have friends and family that work at manufacturers in your area. If you have an inside contact your chances are greatly improved. Next look at companies posting engineering jobs in your area.
Build a presentation (reuse content from your impact award if you have it) and add information about what FIRST is and tell your impact story, for your students and your community. The goal is to get in the door and present and maybe get a tour. You may build a relationship that leads to financial support.
We ask (and track) each student to address 5 letters to family and family friends (orthodontists) to support. Small donations from family adds up.
You have some students who have likely graduated from college. Do you have contact information from them?
We are a school team, and we are fortunate that the system supports us and sets money aside to cover registration and travel; however, those funds were designated for a certain period of time and I amAndyMark trying to make the team self-sustaining.
That over 50K number is, sadly, a rather atypically high amount. We are happy to have our district fund us at 10K, which with various things like activity fees and how grants get deposited is actually more like 6K. But heck, this is not a rich part of the world. As part of my discussions with the District I run the numbers. We are aiming for an FRC team of 34. There is a greater demand, but space and money… Add on our middle school farm club. 7 students, waiting list of 16, same considerations. Divide $6000 by 41 and you get 146 dollars and change per head. And speaking of “per head” a reasonable football helmet at the high school level is about $500. Every member of 5826 will gain things that help them with future college admission, jobs, etc. Our school maybe sends one student every 10 or 15 years on to a career in the NFL. Maybe.
I have been known to get a bit more over the top with this analysis but try to contain myself. Usually.
FRC. Better career prospects and with intact knees to boot.
Tim Wolter
to be fair, the District also pays our students food tab at events, and by school policy it is set at the price it takes to feed a football player. So we make out ok there.
Push for it to be a permanent part of the budget. It took years of lobbying to make it happen, but ultimately we got $10K in funding for registration/tools/equipment, three coaching stipends, and free transportation (where every other non-sport has to pay). That made every dollar of sponsorship and fundraising go that much farther.
As far as fundraising goes, I agree that big-splash money makers have been more successful for us than a lot of little ones–raising $8K in a weekend when it’s flooded with tourists in town for a festival is a lot easier than trying to pull from the same businesses and people in a tiny town all year long.
We no longer have a team, but money wasn’t even vaguely the problem–I’m still sitting on an embarrassingly large “nest egg” for a team that doesn’t have enough students to run.
We’ve been struggling to get fundraising going for years. This year I put together a plan and am working with the team in a much clearer way. I’m focused on two main points. 1 - why should someone give us money. 2- what will we do with the money. 1-4 seems obvious but we have a long way to go here. I think 11 is the key with many companies looking for interesting, engaging social media content. A cool set of HS kids with an awesome robot should be a social media magnet. That is content many sponsors would like to be a part of. With a little creativity this can work with Raytheon or Crazy Bob’s Used Car Lot.
We haven’t actually done it so maybe I’m off base. But its our plan.
Videos showing off the team and robot
Website showing off the team and robot, include future goals section
Social media
Rehearsed presentation
In kind items: mentors(finance, website, social media, mechanical, coding, electrical), lasercut polycarbonate, welding, paint/anodize
What do we offer sponsors:
Gratitude in providing opportunities for students to work hard and build cool things
Sponsor logo visible on robot, shirts, banners, website, etc.
Receive a display frame of a team t-shirt signed by our membership with a team photo
Robot show at the school or sponsor location
Team to work with sponsor on joint social media posts
List of fundraising items: $500 robot parts, $1000 robot parts, $1500 for 2 laptops, $2000 for a set of Romi training bots, $3000 for an advanced drivetrain /swerve, $5000 for pit truss system
To an extent but these are really two radically different scenarios in my mind.
Raytheon is working a bigger grant program - it helps build good will but it’s fundamentally different from something more local.
There are two types of local sponsors:
Crazy Bobs who wants to help but also hopes to get some local promotion out of it (“Hey, that’s some parents that are gonna buy cars!” though Crazy Bob thinks it’s cool to help)
The other is someone that wants to help - like really wants to help. They might be in an esoteric business and not really benefit from the promotion but realize this is cool and important.
That second person was me - I ran a software / hardware product dev company for 21 years. Had the local FIRST team approached me, they’d have walked out with $500+ easy - right away. Probably more over time.
A little memento back to sponsors at the end of the year is cool. The framed signed T-shirt idea is cool but you might want to look at something a little simpler for some sponsors. I’m thinking of your local family restaurant; you know the one with the various plaques by the cash register thanking them for supporting little league, or the local soccer team, or whatever. For those sponsors, doing something like that would be easy for them to show off because they are already doing it. They’re sort of half-way to Crazy Bob’s - they want to show support for local groups because that’s who their customers are - your team could be right next to the little league with a similar sort of recognition and thanks because they’re already doing it. Not saying the bigger thing isn’t cool - because it is - but there might be different things for different folks.
What’s the biggest thing I’d be looking for? Gratitude. That makes a bunch of the in the world run and I’m glad to see it on your list.
The best way to sustain fundraising is to start and then keep doing - go back every year - say thanks - let them know you’re still out there - let them know what their funding supported. That’s where the gratitude parts comes in - make it real and let them know because that’s probably the biggest benefit a local sponsor could get.
Make sustaining of fundraising a real job for your team because it is.
Your list is solid - execute on it with the flexibility to respond to specific sponsors needs and work to keep executing it. You’re starting off in the right way by making a serious plan and that’s great.