Hey Cheif Delphi,
I’m looking to start an outreach team within our team that’s 1) sustainable, 2) growing continuously, and 3) ambitious. To do that, a strong culture of outreach is needed. I’ve seen hall of fame teams, but I can’t find any resources on how their teams are structured or how continued outreach growth is facilitated on their teams.
Any tips on how to start structuring and promoting an outreach team/culture?
Thanks,
Kai
I know this might not seem super helpful, but find a way to inspire your teammates to care about it.
Pushing people does not work, they have to want to do it, so they have to be inspired to want to do it. Take them to volunteer or to a meeting, but make sure the first time you do it is really fun and reasonably well organized, so they’ll want to keep doing it. First impressions matter 
We have an impact subteam that focuses on the community-facing side of our team. They email sponsors, run our social media, keep the website updated, and plan events for us in the community.
I would say that the easiest way to focus on outreach is to start small. Look for local libraries or schools willing to have you come to show off the robot. Take your robot to career fairs and things like that. If you plan it well, you get 2 or 3 outreach events per semester, and that doesn’t eat up too much time for building and off-season training for the technical side of the team.
It really just takes three students and your bot to get your name into your community. As you build your outreach culture, you can start adding events and things like summer camps for younger folks in your area.
People love to have robots come do stuff. Especially where there are kids. It should be easy to find places to go do outreach. Does a local elementary school have a “science night”? Can you get a booth at the county and/or state fair? Get in your homecoming and/or 4th of July parade. Plus we visit as many of our sponsors as will have us. Make contacts with other tech clubs – a local rocketry club needed helpers for their rocketry day, so we helped with that. We’ve even done an Asian Food Festival! (this is, btw, my new favorite outreach event, yummy 
)
The other thing I would suggest is “outreach is everyone’s job” (aka no sponsors == no team). We have an outreach team that finds, schedules, and coordinates events, but everyone is expected to staff outreach events during the year (in fact, it’s a requirement to make the team to do a summer outreach event). Usually the chance to drive the robot a bit is good incentive. We probably average close to 1 per week June through November.
PS, being awesome at outreach just might help you be a dean’s list winner
This is really the key. You’ll get tons of suggestions on where to go to find opportunities to hold an event, what types of events to hold, etc. But none of that helps if people aren’t interested in showing up to do the work!
This comes back to the team’s identity. Who are you as a team? What do you do? How do you do it?
If you don’t already, it’s worth sitting down as a team and creating a mission statement. That tells you and everyone else what you do, and it’s something you can work to rally around. It’s something you use to introduce new students to the team, something you bring up and talk about all the time - we literally spend 5-10 minutes every meeting in the fall asking questions like “what is our mission statement?” and “what does this part of the statement mean to you?”
Our missions statement is “To inspire girls of all ages to incorporate STEM into their lives and to revolutionize the perception of women in STEM”. This guides what we do. The first part, to inspire, guides a large part of our outreach. We use it to help shape what events we do and how we get excited about them. The second part, incorporating STEM, can help guide how we do events. It’s not just about showing off the robot, it’s about showing people they can have a future in STEM too, and being role models for younger kids. The final part, to revolutionize the perception, is the part that deals with competition - how we approach competition, how we want others at events to view us.
Create a good mission statement, make that mission a focus for the team, and you’ll see that culture start to emerge as you plan your events!
Kai,
If your goal is sustainable growth you need to start young. Look for outreach opportunities that will plant a seed with younger students. Look for High School open houses for next fall’s incoming Freshman (Ours in on January 5th). We will demo some robots and talk to the incoming students about our program. In the spring (May) we let new students JOIN our team. We do off season events and build a robot for the 4th of July Parade (T-Shirt Cannon last year). The Parade is also a great way to outreach to the community and posable new students. Look outside of the box.
On my last team, we (the mentors) had a talk with our team when we introduced the outreach requirement (a minimum number of hours each team member has to complete in order to be eligible to attend competitions).
The gist of it was, your mentors each spend hundreds of hours a year working to provide you with a free, high-quality, fun educational experience. We don’t get paid a penny by anyone for it, and we don’t ask or expect you to pay us back. We do it because a mentor made a life-changing impact on each us when we were young (in FIRST or other programs). Rather than paying with money for this program, we ask you to pay it forward by volunteering at outreach events and helping to teach younger kids.
Not every kid buys into it, but between The Talk and The Requirement we have enough participation and excitement to have a pretty strong outreach program.
I think this hits the nail on the head. Building an outreach culture starts from your team’s mission statement and goals, and works outwards from there. It’s difficult to really develop that culture without a well-communicated mission. My high school team, 1902, did an annual strategic planning meeting, either heavily encouraged or required for students and adults, to communicate our mission statement and to evaluate and update our team goals. Our students were heavily invested in that process; investment breeds investment, and having adults and older students (read: role models) invest in that process created a more sustainable and organized team culture. Every outreach we did furthered our mission statement and our team goals in some way.
I think it’s also important that while having a business/outreach sub-team has value, that everyone participates in that “outreach culture” to an extent. On 1902, our Impact Award submission was required reading, we had a small outreach hour requirement and incentivized student participation in our outreaches as well. Beyond that, our technical mentors and technical lead students participated in our outreaches, our award submission development, and every other facet of the team to the extent that they could. In my opinion, FIRST is for teaching students to be tomorrow’s problem-solvers, not just how to CAD and code, and that includes the development of soft skills such as public speaking and communication skills.
TL:DR an outreach culture can’t be built on accident or with only a small portion of the team working separately in a room. I think a team mission, deliberate investment by role models on the team, and constant communication about how outreach furthers the team goals are all steps that lead to the development of that culture.
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