Team Roster Registration Help

Does anyone have any reccomendations about how to get their team members to register in the portal?

I have sent the emails out and tried to walk them through it, but it does not work.

The main issues are…
The validation email never gets to the student.
They cannot check alternate emails as they do not know their passwords.

So they go home, but they never complete the process. For some reason FIRST emails never get to our domain. I have put in a tech request to our tech department, and they do not know what is going on.

We have a small team, but more than the two members who arr currently registered.

Does anyone habe any ideas?

A kind of “out there” idea…hold a team meeting, with parents, at some place where there is unblocked internet. Bring some computers. Have everyone do everything there.

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Fewer kids to monitor at the event then!

I’m about to go through this mess as well. Just had a parent meeting, but only half showed up in person. We’ll see what happens.

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With 40+ students the headache only gets bigger. :). Anyway this is what I have found useful. If the student is under 18. Do not involve them. Registration is about the permission form. The parent goes creates an account on the first website. Go to parent/guardian - youth tab. Click on add youth button. Fill out the various fields and tabs. Apply to a team-FRC-team number. Sometimes a second permission form is required for your region. They hide under the youth option button. The form is not proactive about flagging that is needed.

Coach sending invitation emails to youth/parent is non-productive.

Youth only need to create an account if they are an award submitter.

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I use slack channels to manage the roster, and other such tasks that don’t actually need to be done all at once for any reason besides my sanity. I create a channel (ex. #todo-roster) and drop everybody into it, and they can leave the channel when the task is done. For purposes of the roster that means they’ve joined the team and their parents have signed the C&R form. Having a specific channel means I can send 'at’channel tags with increasing frequency, and makes it easier to keep track of who isn’t cleared yet. I understand that it doesn’t feel like an urgent or important task so it’s easy for their brains to decide that it’s out the window, but the channel contains it in stasis mode so they can mostly get to it when they get to it. Eventually they get tagged enough that their brains decide it’s actually urgent.

As far as technical problems I’ve started asking students to reach out to team support if they have read the available documentation and are still having problems with their account and that’s been effective thus far.

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We start the process early in the season, usually ~November. We do it on our “commitment night”, which all the students along with one parent/guardian are required to attend (this is also when we collect fees, talk about our team handbook, etc.). Doing it early gives us plenty of time to chase down the stragglers.

We tell them they can’t leave until they have registered. Inevitably a few folks need to go, or a parent couldn’t make it, and that’s fine. But in general we try to keep them around until it is done.

Agree that avoiding creating student accounts is ideal - leave it to the parent. Parents can have a lot of the same issues with forgetting passwords, getting into their email, etc., but take out at least one point in the chain. Have them do whatever password resets are necessary until they get in (or just have them create a new account. Doesn’t need to be the same every year). Having the student around is good because they can often help with tech trouble.

I also agree with Frank - don’t both sending out invitation emails. I’ve also given up on the “invite” button next to students from year to year. Just have them apply to the team from their end.

The biggest gotcha we consistently run into is that the parents typically find their own consent and release form first and think it is the consent and release form for the student. It really isn’t clear.

My best tip is to go through the process yourself first. Use a throwaway email address to sign up, apply to the team, and create a fake youth profile. Understanding the flow and where all the buttons are is helpful when your team members inevitably get stuck. You can delete the fake profile from the team later.

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I once blocked the door to the meeting with a table. You didn’t get to climb over the table and into the meeting until registration was complete. Didn’t solve the parent consent issue but it was a start.

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roster

Well hey there. The roster and I have a love/hate relationship.

  1. For future seasons - get it done EARLY - consider having them complete it as part of their registration when they join the team in the fall. (Our deadline to complete this is October 1…)
  2. Instead of waiting for the invitation emails, have families create their own accounts (with whatever email they want to use) and then click ‘apply to team’ - FRC - XYZ. That way, they can do it from home, have the forms signed, and all you have to do as the coach is check off each person as they come in. I usually do it in batches - once a day until the deadline.
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Thank you all for your tips. Thos is exactly what I am looking for.

Next year we will begin early.
This year I will…

Bring Internet to our meeting today.
Have a link with a QR set up so they can do it on their own device.
Walk through it on my own first.

Thank you again.

@Libby_K 172 members is almost half of our entire school wow. That is excellent.

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Your student retention must be much MUCH higher than ours is. If we rostered our students in October, we’d have close to 40% turnover in who’s on the team come March. How do you mitigate the migrating students?

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I would rather have to remove the students from the roster than add them last minute.

For us, forty percent may be three members depending on the year.

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Anyone know where i can find and print out the Consent & Release form?

It is a digital form. The parents sign it digitally in the portal.

We are having issues and parents are not able to digital sign it. I want to download, print and have the forms signed in hand for this Thursday.

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If you sign up as a student, you can get a copy. I do not know if FIRST will recognize this though.

My understanding is First is only accepting printed form on a by case basis. From the registration Q&A:

If you are not able to access a computer, email or the Internet, please contact your youth’s Lead Coach/Mentor to request a paper copy of the FIRST Consent and Release Form. The Lead Coach/Mentor will then contact the local FIRST Program Delivery Partner, who will review request and determine if an exception will be made.

The online form is findable. The web site is a kluge, but here how.
Parent goes to there dashboard. Parent-guardian- youth tab. Click on youth. click on youth options box on the right. Youth consent and release is there.

Good luck and don’t call me Shirley

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This might be a topic for its own thread, but first - we collect interest in July/August, registration in September/October, so the 172 for this season is our locked-in, you joined & did all the steps, registration. We probably had about 230 total folks interested (something as easy as putting your email in during the club fair, then you attend the info sessions, figure out the commitment & whether it’s for you.) - so, 50-60 students looked at what we do and said ‘nah, no thanks, I won’t commit’ - and that’s okay.

Our team activites are year-round. Throughout the fall, we have weekly workshops that teach the basics, including a mini-build / capstone project, then spring semester is, predictably enough, kickoff and build/competition season. Leaders are trained not only to teach the FIRST basics, but to help make the team a welcoming, exciting, fun place to hang out - most folks are motivated to stay on.

I obviously don’t have good full-year data for this season since the year isn’t over yet, but let’s look at 2019-20 as an example of student engagement - with our team, anyone can join & register, but in order to travel you need to meet certain requirements for participation & meaningful work - so let’s call that an ‘active’ student, for the sake of easy numbers. 114 total students, only 12 of those came to meetings/build/committees so little that they weren’t eligible for travel, and although we didn’t end up having a competition season - only four students chose not to re-register for the team the next year, 16 seniors graduated… so 94 stayed on for 2020-21.

For 2020-21, we were all-virtual, so no build but we had 125 students, graduated 25, 6 chose not to come back, leaving, apparently, the magic number of 94 turning over into the this season.

Mid-season for 2022, out of our 172 team members, 144 of them are travel-eligible (i.e. active enough on the team to come to competitions if they want to, though not all do - and, come to think of it as I’m writing, there are some folks whose hours I need to adjust because quarantine this year doesn’t count against them, for obvious reasons - so probably closer to, if not over, 150.)

This is pretty ‘normal’ for us, but I’m not sure I have any sort of secret sauce other than ‘we keep things moving all year round and that helps people not trail off’. We’re very up front with the summer & early fall recruitment that the team is a big commitment, so rather than have folks trail off after registering, they tend to trail off before.

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