We at Team 70/Team 494 have been discussing lately how to expand our recruiting and membership, as it has been dwindling lately. So I was curious as to what sorts of things other teams do to get members, as what we are doing is not working as well as we would like. So does anyone have any strategies that bring in a lot of members that they would be willing to share for myself and for other teams?
Go to feeder schools. Even semi-feeder schools. Even schools that might send only five kids. Getting the kids interested before high school always is a good thing. What really is effective is getting teachers to take students to the competition (that’s how I got hooked!).
Also, freshman orientation/open houses. If your schools work in such a way that parents attend freshman orientation, then nothing works better than telling the parents about the scholarship and other opportunities. Invite them to competitions (if orientation is early enough/the competitions are close enough). Parental support is key. This also goes along with getting them hooked before high school.
If your school has a freshman-mentoring program (Link Crew or something similar), join them. Having members work with the incoming kids forms friendships that can lead to recruitment and a stronger team. This can also lead to “Hey, I’m joining this robotics team cause my mentor talked about it and it sounds cool. You should join too!”.
This all is on top of school announcements and having teachers advertise the team as much as possible. Our physics teacher has handouts for all his classes, and the teacher at our other school (we’re a two-school team as well) would post fliers. One of our teaching-mentors would show the highlight videos from past years when he taught younger classes.
Once you do all those things make sure you mention the extra opportunities given to students because of FIRST, and stress that its not just about robots.
Not getting into every aspect of recruitment, the most effective methods we have found for requirement is to do in-school demonstrations. What I mean by that is going into the classrooms and demonstrating the robot to the students. I have found that it really gets them excited about robotics, and really rallying to join.
Another thing we have found useful is making videos for announcements within the school. The video is short, and basically makes robotics seem like the coolest thing ever. Don’t forget to mention how well you did, since kids like to see good stats from their school’s team.
These things, along with our community involvement, have brought us in about 15+ persons a year for the past few years. It also helps to get school involvement. 
Our school district actually has a science discovery night where students in grades 6-8 come and check out what different extra cirricular activities are available at the middle school and high school. We bring a robot with us and show them what it can do with some videos on display and some demonstrations. Our robot is on it’s way back from the championship right now, and the event is this week, so we are a little disappointed because we feel like breakaway would be the perfect game to get kids interested. We usually steal the show anyway though because kids are like, “ooooooooo look a robot! Did you make that?” and then they stare at us in awe because they cannot imagine making something that awesome 
(that was me four years ago)
you might not be so lucky as to have a recruiting opportunity like that, but it helps to look for different ways you could show off your robots in public where there is a strong possibility of potential members getting a chance to see your robot. Also, I have heard of other teams asking I they could bring the robot into classes to recruit members, which I could imagine being successful.
I agree with above, recruiting at middle and elementary schools is an awesome way to go, except I kind of take it to a different level. Starting FLL and JFLL teams goes a long way. If you start with a team of 6 year olds, 8 years later you’ll have kids itching to get on the FRC team.
One tactic that I have found particularly useful is recruiting through siblings. My first year in the team was way back in the glory days of 2003. I come from a fairly large family of 4 and now some 7 seasons later I have had 1 sister graduate after 4 years of participation. I have another sister on the team right now.
And my little brother (Donagh) is known as 1403’s youngest member. Donagh has been actively helping the team since he was 8 and is now in 6th grade and is working with his friends (who he has told all about the competition to) to restart an FLL team at his middle school. All of my siblings got started with the program because they got dragged to it by me after I got my parents involved (my dad is a drive coach and my mom helps with awards and various fundraisers).
However, it has evolved into doing a little bit more than just sitting around waiting for the day to end. At first they got to be runners for the team at competition (little kids can find ways around robots and crowds like you wouldn’t believe). Then, it evolved into hanging around the older kids scouting robots in the pits. After that, there was some volunteering at regionals and off-seasons as a field reseter and Co-MCing Monty Madness for a few matches. Recently there has been some major progress, Donagh helped fabricate 1403’s robot this past year, at a regional this past year he helped a NASA machine shop out as a runner for their parts. He did so much work this year it earned him a spot in the team picture and a trip to the NJ and Boston regionals (he really was sad he didn’t get to go to Atlanta with the rest of the team). He has 2 years until he is old enough to be on the pit crew or drive team, and he can’t wait to get there.
There are a lot of benefits of recruiting this way, in my opinion its the best way to train somebody. Plus you get that satisfaction of being a good older sibling. Little kids always look up to the older ones, take advantage of it and get them into this.
I have also never seen a button collection half the size of his, and I have been doing this for quite sometime.
We recruit with duct tape & zip ties. Grab them when they’re not looking, zip tie their limbs together and keep them still (and quiet) with duct tape. When they agree to join the team, we set them free. 
ahem.
Start with FLL in elementary school, move up to FTC in middle school. By mentoring these teams in our sending districts, we have a built-in stream of interested freshmen each year. In fact, some think our team is too large.
We have multiple demonstrations, and we seem to grandfather in alot of people. Sisters, brothers, cousins. Etc.
Our team recurits by letting people know where out there! At school open houses and activities, we make sure to let people know to come check out the robotics team, and we make announcements for our school before build season comes up, to get interested people (who can so no to building a robot!? :D). Last year we also went to one of the Grand Blanc Middle School’s and demo’d our robot to them. Spreading the word by mouth, or just wearing team apparel, has helped also. I know we pull from various places, between the few of us in band that get our friends, getting people from advanced math and science classes, and the teacher who teaches the engineering classes at our school (who doubles as a mentor) encourages people to join the team/go to competitions.
This year I’m gonna try to get a short, maybe one minute, video encouraging people to join on the announcements. Show them what we do, what we learn, how much fun it is, ect.
And one of the biggest things I’ve noticed, is kids that really want to join, will make it there. I was very proactive in high school about trying to join our robotics team, and other students that are will find there way there.
We use absolutely any tool or method we can! We hope we get feeders from the FLL teams, but to add to that we attend the spring HS activity fair that is put on for the 8th graders. We attend freshman orientation meetings where we promote FIRST scholarships to hook Mom and Dad. We make commercials to show on morning announcements at the HS. We hang signs everywhere (school approved of course). We hold intoductory meetings where we serve free pizza and soda and ask the team members to bring friends and family members. We post the list of scholarships outside the guidance office. Our teacher advisors help us recruit. We also do a lot of activities to make us visible at the school: participating in pep rallys, hosting a blood drive, pizza and candy sales afterschool.
Once we recruit, our most difficult part had been retention (typically 30%), but this year we used a mock build season with vex robots and doubled our retention rate! :yikes: By the time build season started we had 20 returning students and 18 new students!
We have an announcement over the intercom around the beginning of the school year and we have fliers hung up giving information about a recruiting meeting where we show a PowerPoint and tell people that are interested what we love about FIRST. Our district also holds activity fairs at all 3 high schools where we can show off our robot with a tether and we hand out our flair.
Thanks for all the suggestions! I just have a couple more related questions:
What about the financial aspect? What is the cost for a student to join your team?
How do you go about acquiring sponsors for the team (do you make cold calls, do they call you, etc)?
In order to join the team, we ask for a $100 joining fee; although if you cant pay this, then we will not force you to pay in order to be on the team.
That $100 guaurentees you free transportation and housing for 1-2 travel events (MSC and Traverse, or GLR and BMR were the 09 and 08 events). It also helps offset the costs of Championships, so the cost to the student is only $100-$150. Once again covering travel and lodging down to Atlanta (or St. Louis)
It also covers build season meals on saturdays, and the occasional dinner at a competition.
For acquiring sponsors we do a combination of both things you listed. Our main sponsor GM was acquired many years ago, but I believe that we had to apply for that sponsorship ourselves. We also called and demonstrated at many local businesses in order to get some of our smaller sponsorships.
Fortunately we have also been handed sponsorships. This was due to our performance as a team in and out of competitions. Those come far and wide, so don’t expect them to just be handed to you.
For our team the price has been steadily decreasing. The cost to be on the team in 2008 was around $400ish, it stayed there over 2009, and in 2010 it dropped to $250 (and each parent provides a meal over build season). This if for meals at each competition, and one hotel stay.
I don’t know about previous year sponsors, but this year our team (probably me with revision from the team mentors) is putting together a power point to show the sponsors about what there money is going to. Then we’ll probably have a few students present it to potential sponsors.
Ok. Because our costs for joining run about $250 plus the cost of t-shirts, and I was wondering how that compared to other teams. Do you guys use sponsor money to help kids pay for things, or does sponsor money go right to the robot and supplies that go along with that?
Kids usually flock to us at our school.
At the beginning of the school year, our school holds a kind of after school “club fest”, where all the clubs hold booths to advertise to the new freshman, and returning students. We’re usually the guys in Hawaiian shirts in the middle of our ‘commons’ with one of our robots out. Our coach puts out a laptop with a sign up excel sheet, and at the end of the day, we’ll see a list of more than 50 kids who want to in on the fun.
The demos help a lot. Kids get to see what they’re getting into, and they usually find getting pelted with poof balls (06), or lunacy balls (09) very fun .
After the 2009 season, 4 of us juniors (now seniors) felt the team (45) was falling apart and wouldn’t last much longer unless things were changed. We made a sheet that we handed out to our steering committee with an almost rebuild of the team. One of the key topics that we emphasized was Recruitment. We noticed that every year, we would lose maybe 6-7 members and only gain 3-4. At the beginning of the 2009 year, I think we had maybe 3 freshmen. With us losing almost 8 seniors. We knew we needed to step up in the recruitment area.
Here is the Recruitment section directly from the original sheet with starred activities ones that I personally know we did. The ones with stars have added comments and notes about what we did in parentheses:
Recruitment
Appeal Interested Students
-Career Center/PLTW
-Organized, willing to try new things, driven
-Not necessarily interested in engineering
-New Mentors?
**Scrimmage in Kokomo?**
**Bring robot to students*** (We did multiple demos at the school during lunch and the school's open house. With it being the lunacy bot (slick wheels), we were able to greatly interact with students at the school. One key point it that with slick wheels, we could let them drive the robot without any worry of damage)
**Middle School Demos**
**Mentor FLL Teams (Required)**
**Local Scrimage for FLL Teams*** (held this but was not able to attend)
**Work with Bonavista**
**Multiple Events Early*** (We held many of these ideas early in the school year to give students time to think about joining the team and allow them to ask questions before getting a feeling of commitment)
**Emphasize Administration**
**Convocation?*** (We drove the robot around the auditorium during a convocation made to promote joining different events at the school)
**Channel 1**
**Teacher info*** (We handed out recruitment posters and team information for teachers to display and hand out. We made emphasis to get these to every math and science teacher in the building)
**Call out meeting after school with teachers/students*** (Normally, we have a callout meeting at 6p.m., long after students had gone home and had trouble getting back. This was made to let them come in right after school without having to come back. We still held a recruitment meeting after school at 6 for parents to understand what happened on the team. During this recruitment, students present interesting things that happen in FIRST, then we leave the parents and mentors to do their stuff while we do introductions and engineering related activites with the new students. One activity we did was split eveyone up into teams and give them 35 index cards in which we would challenge them to build the tallest tower with only folds and cuts)
**Open House for recruitment*** (We hold an annual open house every year to let anyone in Kokomo visit and see what the team is doing at our shop. We promote students at the school to visit the open house, as this is one of the main chances for them to see the shop and robots they will work with during the season)
**Information Pages on students and adults**
**Sign-ups for subgroups*** (we promoted making a board with subgroups in which students would thumbtack index-cards with their names on a group. We felt this gave them a sense of belonging to a group and promoted working and learning the people they would work with. We also encouraged and let them know they could switch groups at any time)
**Football/Basketball/sport Games*** (here, we demoed robots, set up our spirit ball (new years ball we drop downtown programmed with school colors), and use a t-shirt cannon to launch t-shirts and plastic footballs into the stands)
Overall, this worked amazingly well. We had 12 new freshmen, with a total population of new members from every grade being almost 15 or 16 students.
Some other things we do are hold an annual new years ball drop, wear shirts around the school, display beautiful FIRST trophies in various places around the school, and get involved with the community. We have also started to try and get middle school students (specifically 8th graders) to come to off season events so they can experience the thrill of a FIRST event without having to make a commitment.
One very important point in recruitment is ALWAYS communication. We started a mass texting list with the students on the team so we could inform them (especially the new members) when meetings were(This is in addition to an always up to date Google Calendar that is linked to the TechnoKats site). This allowed them to show up at the shop and learn the equipment and not get bored. We also had students show up for “invention sessions.” One of our newer mentors started this after his first year with the team. This allowed students to tackle projects they wanted to do so they may stay active with the team, which again, goes back to allowing new students to learn the shop and who to go to if they need help. Some of the projects included a cim powered bike and a trailer for a medical facility in Africa. This is a great way to get members involved early.
Hope this helps