Though somewhat self-explanatory, this page which you have laid your eyes upon is a guide to our finance management at 4311. Including leadership, fundraising is one of the tasks that Administration in particular combats. One may at first consider fundraising the boring and unimportant part of FRC but, they are actually mistaken. Without fundraising, being able to run a team such as this is virtually impossible. It is easy to say that our team is one of the backbones of the team in that respect. The skills for being able to create and host fundraisers is also very useful for tasks outside of FRC that one can benefit from the future. The following sections provide more insight on our fundraising tactics

Over the years, our team has been able to amass an adequate amount of funding through the tactics listed in this section. Being able to continue these tactics in the future will be great for our team as a whole to take advantage of, especially in our location. Though Swampscott is a very great town, in order to gain funds for something as expensive as FRC or robotics in general, we had to be a little creative:

• Canning- This strategy is definitely one of our most effective methods for obtaining money for the season. We utilize two locations when it comes to canning. The primary location which gets us the most money is Stop and Shop. Second, is the Dunkin Donuts that is in Nahant. The process involves calling one of these locations and requesting a date(make sure to communicate with the Administration Captain to ensure no confusion). After confirmation, create a spreadsheet with the times you will be canning for and ask members to please sign up for certain hours. Make sure when making the sheet you cover both doors (left and right) so you can get through everyone. Make sure your members know what they are canning for and solidify certain phrases to use in order to interest people into giving you funds. Lastly, of course bring the signs with you as well as the canning buckets and some type of storage device to store funds when your can is full.

• SEF Grant- In the recent years of our team history, we have been pretty successful in being able to receive a grant from the Swampscott Education Foundation(SEF). They are an organization in Swampscott who gives grants for educational purposes to clubs/teams as well as teachers sometimes. Normally, you would receive the form and fill out the intended paperwork as it states. But, thanks to the Administration Team of 2019, we have a workable format in our Team Google Drive where you would only need to tweak a few minor things depending on what you would need as of that build year.

• Restaurant Fundraisers- When it comes to restaurant fundraisers we have 3 main contenders. We have Chipotle, Five Guys, and Panera Bread. Five guys tends to be the best out of the three and it is also usually the easiest to set up. With all of these fund raisers you can go to the restaurant website and set up a date on there. For Five Guys in particular, you would need to call them to set up a date. All the restaurants would give you a flier for the restaurant date for you to either hang up around the school or pass out by hand (It is preferable if you do both!). It is good to always confirm with the restaurant around a week before your date just to make sure nothing goes wrong such as one of our instances before. That should also be around the time where you should be printing out the fliers and passing and/or hanging them up. Lastly, on the restaurant day, in order for it to go smoothly please ensure that a few members go to enjoy themselves with food that helps the team!

• GoFundMe- Though our least profitable source of income, we have a GoFundMe. If there is a way to promote it more, then maybe this will end up being more profitable at a later time. As of now it is dead as rocks.

This section in particular should be ideas that Administration might want to employ for the upcoming season in regards to fundraising. It is the responsibility of the Admin Captain to update this page when either an idea is now in use or when a new season starts.

• More Grants- As of the 2020 season, COVID-19 has made it hard to pursue our primary source of fundraising or in other words, canning. In order to combat this issue, an idea that we have come up with is simply applying for more grants. Certain businesses have grant programs that give out sums of money that can help out our team and it is important to take advantage of that. The goal is to research multiple sites for grants (preferably STEM) and form a spreadsheet that we would later discuss on which ones to pursue. From there, we would simply just follow the process that the specific grant entails.

• Snapshare- As a suggestion from one of the other captains, an option that we may go with is this service called snapshare. The idea of snapshare entails us sending these emails to friends and relatives of the team, and from there those families will hopefully donate a little money to our team. The word on the grape vine is that this service has provided other teams/clubs like us with a large sum of money.