Team Ground X’s fundraising and outreach tips

Hit the ground running with team Ground X’s tips and tricks for a successful fundraising and outreach season.

On 11 October 2023, we invited the West Midlands Design Award-winning team, Ground X, from Outwood Academy Newbold, to join our in-season webinar. UK-090 team members Samson and Cameron shared their successful approach to fundraising and outreach activities in past seasons.

Here are some key takeaways from their talk. Watch the full discussion on the Access All Webinars page in Makerspace.

Team profile

Team name: Ground X

Team number: UK-090, 20993

School: Outwood Academy Newbold

Years of participation:  5

Awards: West Midlands – Design Award Winners

Social media: Follow Ground X on Instagram @Groundxrobotic and X @GroundX_

Fundraising

• Fundraising is vital to cover the cost of extra components you may want to use to elevate your robot design
• It’s important to do some initial planning to get fundraising ideas flowing before jumping straight in
  Take advantage of what’s going on at the time – we started fundraising around the Christmas period, so made baubles to sell at our school’s Christmas fair
• Utilise whatever is readily available to you – we 3D printed a lot of small toys, keyrings and trinkets because it was accessible to us at school
• We did a lot of custom commission work on the printers to make our products more appealing and justify charging a higher price
• Explain the goal you’re trying to achieve with your fundraising efforts to potential customers to encourage a purchase
• Work towards minimising the cost of what you’re producing if you go down the sales route. Don’t try and make something big and fancy because you’ll spend a lot of money and might not see positive results
• Play to your strengths – what do you have? What are you good at? We have 3D printers and people who are skilled at CAD so worked with that

OutreachWe presented at our academy’s year 6 open evening where we set up an arena with a test track that students could drive our robot around on

• We used the opening evening to get our local community involved – drumming up more interest and excitement for robotics and FIRST Tech Challenge in our academy
• Make sure you use social media frequently to document your team’s progress and reach out to other teams for support
• Focus on having both an Instagram and an X account as teams are spread out across the two
• Be creative with your ideas. Don’t try and design something overly complicated but think outside of the box, for example, our robot is quite basic in terms of what it does but we made custom casings which we laser cut, assembled and painted to make us stand out from the crowd

Parting words: Don’t just build a robot, build a robot with flare. 🔥

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