Part #6: Sustainability | SUMMER ROBOTICS: Tips and Tricks for Your Team

This topic goes hand-in-hand with making goals. A lot of your team's goals will be geared towards sustainability, or your team's ability to compete in future seasons. This takes a lot of thinking ahead (and a lot of adult help, specifically in the realm of money and budgeting) to keep your team moving. This is critical to get going as soon as your team is up and running because, sadly, we all eventually age out of FTC, and you need to set your team up for success before you have to leave. These are some of the things we found most useful for our team when it came to creating a sustainability plan.

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Tip #1: Use a budget

You should know by now that money doesn't grow on trees, and if you hadn't noticed, FTC is not a cheap competition. Robot parts can get quite expensive when you start to add them all up, and that's not to mention competition fees and your team swag and merch. Money is a big part of making a sustainable team. It's simple: no money, no team. So, you definitely don't want to run out because then you've just dug your team into a really deep hole. Budgeting, as cheesy as it sounds, is probably the most useful way to keep track of all your team's expenses. If you constantly write down every single order of robot parts, competition fees, and other expenses your team made throughout the season, it's just a simple adding game to find out how much you spent and how much you earned. But...there's a little more to an FTC budget than just writing out a bunch of numbers and adding them up at the end. Many of the judges of your notebook and the referees want to see why you spent the money that you did. They want to make sure that your team isn't just spending money on random things, but useful things that helped your team. I would recommend adding a rationale next to each of your items in your budget where you explain why you made that purchase. Our team has been doing this in all of our budgets and it really helps to show your team's responsibility with money. Here is what it may look like in your engineering notebook:

The FIRST fundraising toolkit also recommends to create a budget summary in your engineering notebook for quick references. Here is the sample they provide:

Bottom line: you need to keep track of all the money that is going in and out of your team. The last thing you need is to not be able to compete next season because your team is bankrupt.

Tip #2: Find a long-term sponsorship

But then there's making money too. It would cost a fortune for each team member and their parents to support the team, but luckily there are so many companies and businesses and people in general who support the same mission as FIRST and would be willing to support an FTC team. Your team will just have to reach out to people and find the right person who can help keep your team up and running. I recommend using the FTC fundraising resources from FIRST to walk you through getting a company sponsorship (https://www.firstinspires.org/resource-library/ftc/fundraising-resources). But your team doesn't want to have to go through the grueling process of trying to find new sponsors every season, so we recommend that you find a sponsor that is willing to support you for many seasons. Even several sponsors that will continue to support your team would be great. This is more sustainable than having to search over and over again.

Tip #3: Apply for grants

Grants are super similar to sponsorships, but usually they come as a once-a-season deal and require some more planning. Many of the grants our team has applied for have very hard deadlines and are only offered once a year. But once you get down a schedule of when to apply for certain grants each year, it becomes much easier to receive many of the same grants each year. Your team could always forgo the grant option and stick with finding sponsors, but we want to encourage you to do both. It can allow your team to reach out to more people and to grow with access to more resources.

Tip #4: Mentor students who have to potential to join the team

Like I said before, we all eventually age out of FTC and leave our team short another person. If your team isn't looking out for new people who are interested in FTC (preferably younger people), then you're gonna run out of team members within a few seasons. FTC is not an exclusive club only for computer and programming nerds or math whizzes, but it does require a wide variety of skills across your team members to make a successful team. A lot of these skills are learned on the job, though. This is why the rookie year is so important for teams to learn all the details of being an FTC team. But once your team has that foundational knowledge, you don't want the new team members each season to be lost and way further behind than the rest of the team. We recommend that for the last season a member is on the team, they focus their time on training and mentoring another student who is interested in joining your team after the older team members age out. If your team has room under the 15 member limit for teams, you should have them join the team for this mentoring season. This gets them more involved and heightens their experience in receiving knowledge. If your team doesn't have room for more members, invite these trainees to your meetings and practice sessions and have them attend competitions in the audience (since only the team is allowed in the pits and on the field usually). Teaching these students the little details and tips about being in FTC can better prepare them to be the most useful asset to your team in the future.

Tip #5: Set long-term goals

See? Goals and sustainability are two peas in a pod. Any sort of goal or goal plan you make that you intend to last many seasons is part of your sustainability. Sustainability is more than keeping your team up and running; it's growing your team to be better than the season before (whether that means making it to state competition or inspiring more students to be interested in STEM). Of course you set your goals for this season (see our last blog post SUMMER ROBOTICS: Part #5 Setting Goals for more tips about setting goals), but you also need your goals that will keep your team focused on sustainability and the future seasons beyond what is happening right now. These goals can be anything from having three new people join the team to finding a sponsor to fund your team for the next decade. There are so many ways to go about making your team sustainable, so get creative and find goals that work best for your team. And don't forget to note how you're going to work towards completing those goals.

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Be on the lookout for our next blog post with more tips and tricks next week about using hardware and building the machine that will become your robot. We hope you enjoy this SUMMER ROBOTICS series and put some of these tips to good use with your FTC team.