Hi all,
I’m the lead Marketing & Public Relations mentor for Team 3501, Firebots from Fremont High in Sunnyvale, CA. We’re looking for any local alumni and/or other mentors that have experience with marketing, media (including animation), or other related fields (whether from your former team, work, or elsewhere) to support our fledgling M/PR division. As with many FIRST teams we currently do a lot in this department with only a small group of (very dedicated) students, so any additional help would be appreciated!
I’m not a mentor, but I am the lead for Public Relations on my team which is located in Anaheim. If you’d like, I can send you some workshop presentations and PR material that 3309 has created to give you guys some examples of marketing to work off of.
Also, we run a small team here but all of our marketing and PR work is made easier via consistent branding. Rather than having to sit down and design a new logo, flyer, or handout for every event we host, t-shirt we make, etc., we just stick to the same branding standards and a set template for doing things. This makes everything easier because we don’t need to spend time on re-inventing the wheel. We just place whatever text we need into our flyers.
I can PM you any other tips that I’ve learned over the years on 3309 and how we market ourselves, run PR, etc.
Jon, it would be great if you could send those, thanks! It’s always useful to see how other teams approach this - especially branding standards, which we have yet to solidify.
That said, most of the infrastructure you mentioned is or will be in place on our team. We are looking for additional mentors not so much because we don’t know how to approach PR at all, but because there are currently only two of us mentors supporting this division that may not be available as often as we should be, so we were looking for some additional folks who could support the students in their endeavors at the times that we can’t.