Just thought I would post this and see what happens. The economic crisis that has hit the U.S., seems to me, would affect many teams out there.As for our team, we have lost all our major corporate sponsors and we are driving a hard fund raising campaign like never before. Companies like Wells Fargo(a bank), Honeywell, Author Blank Foundation (Home Depot) , and others have either told us they no longer have the funds available or have not answered us. So we are searching for new sponsors and we are hitting the AZ tax credit plan. I knew the day would come that we would be hurting for money again, but I didn’t think it would happen to us now. Oh well. We will keep looking for new money. I would like to hear from others out there. Is anyone else out there also suffering more this year?
Not directly to us (they still sponsor us) but a team I was helping which is located 5 minutes away from the Siemens Corporation HQ was turned down by the directer of the charitable giving foundation and stated “in these hard times,” they just couldn’t do it. Totally sucked b/c usually when teams live in a company’s area they will receive sponsorships or donations, but seems like the economic downturn does have effects on everyone.
Best regards to all the teams struggling out there. The only thing I wonder now is how long we too will last. =/
Our team hasnt been affected by the financial crisis, yet… Just 5 days before our school year started our mentor took a job in another district.:ahh: We have been trying for about 4 weeks now to get an advisor from the school. We havent contacted any of our sponsors yet because we dont have an advisor. Or a mentor. We are leaning towards a student led team this year with no mentor. We may have 2 school staff members that are just there because there has to be someone with us at all times.
So yeah, the financial crisis hasnt affected us yet. We have our own crisis.
Funny, but one of our company that builds houses is no longer able to sponsor us. They usually give us $20,000-30,000. Bummer:confused:
Wow, that is a big bummer…
But on the bright side, we still get about 30,000 from other sponsors.
We are in the unique position of not being allowed to fund raise by our school, so we rely entirely on money from NASA/Bellarmine.
Our funding has been cut somewhat by the school due to the economy, and TBD from NASA. If anything it’ll probably get worse before it gets better.
Fredi - Thank you so much for posting!
I think this is something that all the teams should take note of, Falcon Robotics is not a new team or a team that would ever be considered at being at risk of losing sponsors and having to really work for funding. As a whole, we always assume that Championship Chairman’s Teams somehow have it easy when it comes to year to year survival!
So this may be a wake up call to all of the teams, especially in the current economic state, the teams that we think of as the best and strongest do not necessarily have it any easier in getting the money to compete, they earn it the same way, one sponsor at a time and one fund raiser at a time! FIRST - its not just a Robot Competition - teams need to learn and put in place valuable business skills to survive!
Good luck to all in meeting your sponsorship goals for this year!
Well I don’t know if it has affected us then it has changed how Xerox wants to handle funding for the teams. Now all the veteran team will have a smaller budget to work with (in a few years no more site for the X-Cats) and they want to have $6000 for smaller Xerox teams. The budget switch has affected the Sparx the most but eventually all Xerox teams will probably have to fundraise to go to the championship.
It’s a good things we’re engineers who regularly squeeze out ‘miracles’ with a severely limited budget, eh? I think that’s an important aspect that we as mentors need to show the students from time to time, and this year is a perfect opportunity.
We’re in a similar situation – the school district restricts clubs and sports to two fundraisers per school year, and the fundraisers have to be approved a year in advance. I’m not sure why that’s the way it is, but we live with it and got by ok in past years.
This year’s probably a different story.
We only wanted 2 FTC teams this year but wound up having such a successful student recruitment that we were almost forced to found 4 teams. Luckily we had 4 last year so this year’s registration didn’t kill our budget completely. Our FRC prototype platform will use many more scrap parts than we had originally intended. Something tells me our production FRC robot will be more of the same. Hopefully the rules don’t change and still allow us to use unmodified COTS products purchased and used in the 2008 game.
This shocked me too. Maybe this year the Chairman’s video could focus more on how sponsors make a difference and what their impact is.
In terms of funding, often there is no way around the cost of regional fees and travel costs. There really isn’t a way to engineer around them, especially considering they make up far more of the budget than robot cost.
Mr. Kind is gone? Have you let Cooney know this? I’m sure they’d be more than willing to help you guys out with this.
Chairman’s intergrates everything it takes to run a team.
I don’t think that’s the best way to approach this.
Instead, I will predict that the Entrepreneurial awards will be VERY hard to judge this year with many teams having very similar financial issues due to the economy as a whole.
Even more so than in recent years.
What some teams will do to not only survive this year, but to bounce back stronger than ever will be interesting & tough to judge IMHO.
I knew that a thread like this would pop up eventually.
It makes a sustainability plan that much more important for every team to consider.
It will also make that entereprenuership award that much more prestigious this year. 
There is an easy way to work around school regulations regarding the number of fundraising drives. Simply form a “Friends of Team ####” as a non-profit organization. Do all of your fundraising through this non-profit organization, then have that non-profit donate all of its money to running your team in a single annual grant/sponsprship.
Our school district has a non-profit through which we do most of our financials (donations, fundraisers, etc.) We are lucky for now, in that they do not charge any administrative fee either. Running your own non-profit does involve some extensive paperwork and rule following - we have yet to find a volunteer to take that on (some think they want to do it, then they find out how much they have to do and decide it is too much work).
That is one option, but I’m not so sure its that easy.
When we had to setup our non-profit account, it involved a federal EIN no. and State excise tax registration and we still have to file and pay taxes for fundraisers. We also have a 501c3 account, but that involves a board and the hiring of an independent outside accounting firm for our required annual audit.
Its another level of opportunity to get funding support, yet requires responsibility at a whole other level.
The paperwork for the EIN alone is enough to make any sane person go crazy. It’s rough work. The reward is worth it, but only few dare to take the insane journey…
We did it, it is indeed insane…and then you get to spend the rest of your life figuring out just what you can and can’t do.
We’re getting there, a year and a half later.
Fortunately we have a head start on funds for this year. I hope the taxpayers of Arizona help us out as much as they have in the past…we have a great (voter approved proposition) state tax credit program that lets residents direct where some of their tax money goes, and robotics is one option!