Promotional Materials

FIRST General Forum
#1

I am currently helping to start a new team, and need a little bit of help.

This team has been around for a while, but is getting ‘revamped’ heavily. This will include expanding from only one high school, to several, with many other plans in the works for FLL. In order to get people interested, such as teachers from the schools and other engineers and volunteers, we will need some promotional materials.

Although this team has been around for a while, they have almost no footage of their own to share. I’m looking for professional grade promotional materials, from any team, anywhere, that I can use to help ‘reel’ people in. Does anyone have anything they’d like to share?

Thanks,
Amanda Morrison

#2

You might try contacting FIRST directly, I know they provide some really nice color pamphlets for VIP’s at the Regionals.

#3

Try one of these from FIRST’s website…

http://www.usfirst.org/about/impact.htm

http://www.usfirst.org/about/media.htm

#4

SOAP108 (SigmaC@t) has a bunch of videos on their website for people to download from some regionals (this year and last [unless they removed last years]):

http://www.soap108.com

#5

I’m not sure what you’re looking for. Is it video, PowerPoint, or literature? All three? Something else?

The good news is that with PC tools you can get to 98% of professional with only 2% of the cost. Don’t overlook inexpensive tools like Microsoft Publisher or even Word. I’ve attached a little tri-fold fundraising piece I put together as a sample for our team. When it’s finished the copy will be better focused and the graphics will be upgraded, but – and this is the point – I banged this out in about two hours. It just isn’t hard to put together handouts today. (I created this in Publisher, but CD inscrutably won’t let me attach a .pub file. I’ve converted it to pdf so you can get an idea of what it looks like. OK, now they’re telling me it’s too big. If you want to see it, I can email it – but it is 1.19MB.)

You can take a file like this to a quick-print place and they can produce it on nice stock with color-laser printing. I don’t think the average person or institution you approach will expect a $10,000 graphics printing job from a high school group.

#6

I have already contacted FIRST and gotten materials from them. I have already gotten things from FIRST’s website. I have already saved SOAP matches.

I’m looking for powerpoint, pamphlets, booklets, flyers, posters, anything! Anything that you’d use to reel in a sponsor, a teacher from a high school, recruiting students, getting the community to volunteer, anything that a team would use to make themselves known and to show off what FIRST really is.

#7

We have our team’s brochures on our website: http://www.bcrobotics.org/media.htm

#8

www.moe365.org for the free download of the 3 minute video done at Philly last weekend.

#9

Amanda,
You might already have the testimonial package, but if not:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/papers.php?s=&action=single&paperid=389

In addition to that, I’ve also found that animations are nice eye candy as well. Check team websites, including www.cybersonics.org .

The FIRST resource center does have a powerpoint you can customize and use as well.

If you want to talk specifics sometime on how I (and others) use these in different kinds of presentations, let me know.

-Rich

#10

I’ve put together two highlight reels this year for two different teams which will be used for promotional, sponsorship, and recruitment purposes. Low-res versions are at:

http://web.mit.edu/first/www/05media/05reel_512.wmv
http://web.mit.edu/scolton/www/527vid/527reel_512.wmv

If you would like higher-resolution versions of either, please let me know.

-Shane

#11