What a sponsorship delivers

Audience

Brand visibility where engineers are

Regional, state and international competitions, in front of thousands of attendees. The FIRST Championship alone draws more than 50,000 people from 66 countries. The audience is engineers, educators and industry professionals, not a general crowd.

Placement

Logo placement

On the robot, on team uniforms, on the pit banner we hang at every event from league play to the World Championship, and on every piece of competition material we produce.

Recognition

Recognition all season

Logo and a written paragraph about your organisation on this site, tagged mentions across our social channels, and a season newsletter that goes out whether or not the results were good. Our sponsor wall is part of the site rather than a page nobody updates.

Access

Come and see the thing you paid for

Tour the lab, sit in on a build session, or have the team present to your staff. Sponsors who have done this get more out of it than sponsors who have not, and it costs us nothing but an afternoon.

Evidence

A documented STEM connection

Everything we do is dated and public in the build log, so your support maps to specific work rather than a logo on a shirt. That makes it usable in ESG reporting and community investment narratives.

In kind

Not all of it has to be money

Materials and machine time count. Aluminium stock, polycarbonate, fasteners, bearings, filament. An engineer for one design review is worth more than most cheques. We are happy to accept non-monetary donations.

Where you would be seen

Competitions are only half of it

The other half is outreach, which is where a sponsor logo sits in front of people who are not already in the robotics world. A sample of last season:

  • SPARK STEM Fest, Orlando Science Center. A public STEM day with a four figure turnout. We ran the robot all day and handed the controller to anyone short enough to need a box to stand on.
  • SpaceCom. A space industry conference. We talked to people working in exploration, cybersecurity and the US Navy, which is a strange room for a high school team to be in and exactly why we went.
  • Indian Spring Mela. A local cultural festival, where we ended up in front of school board representatives from several counties.
  • Mentoring two other FTC teams. Software debugging and late season robot triage, for teams that would otherwise have gone to their event with a machine that did not run.

Alongside that we post through the season on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and this site is the hub they all point at. Sponsor recognition runs across all of them rather than one post at signing.

Where it goes

What a season actually costs

Every dollar goes through the team budget. Last season it came to roughly thirteen thousand dollars, and this season will not look very different:

  • Parts, supplies and equipment, about $5,000. Motors, servos, sensors, the control system, structure, machining, and the parts that break in week three.
  • Travel, lodging and meals, about $4,000. Getting a team and a robot to the World Championship, and making sure nobody has to sit it out because of what it costs.
  • Registration and event fees, about $3,200. Team registration, league play, the state championship, and Worlds when we earn it.
  • Outreach, tools and the unexpected, about $650. Demonstration materials, printing, tooling, and the parts we hand to rookie teams getting started.

Figures are last season's actuals. Named tiers with specific amounts arrive once this season's budget is finalised.

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Any amount. It goes straight to the team, and it is tax deductible.

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Current supporters

Who backs this team

A copy of the official registration and financial information may be obtained from the Florida Division of Consumer Services by calling toll free 800-435-7352 within the state. Registration does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by the state.