Recruiting Event Ideas

We always go into the freshmen classes and give a presentation.  Often times they will even have a dedicated "club day" in class just for this. There is also a new student welcome the Engineering college puts on where we set up a booth with the car and hand out flyers with info and meeting times. Our former team captain was also an RA and it always seemed like about half his floor always showed up to meetings, at least at the beginning.

Between these activities and word of mouth we generally get a good number of new people.

Our situation was similar to Arizona. We never had much trouble getting a lot of people interested in the first meeting, or even the second. 

We find its generally good to have new people do a little work on the cars (generally repairing damage from comp :p ) followed by a driving event.  This lets them see that it takes work to make the cars run, without making them wait 2 semesters for much gratification.  We also do shop organization days and teaching workshops, which helps people become more comfortable coming in to the shop.

We definitely get the people who don't care to put in the time, but if you can give them a quick reward for a little work, it does help retention.

In my experience, there isn't much you can do to make someone want to be there. Most of our quality members had past experience in working on something whether it was cars, lawnmowers, etc... and are addicted to it.

It's very hard to create this from complete scratch.

Bi-Brow wrote: Now when it comes time to the universal problem of keeping them around I would love to know the secrets.

dillon_b12 wrote: I really enjoyed Baja from the time I joined even before I went to a race, but going to Ocala to watch is what really got me hooked.  Nothing you can do will explain the experiences of going to a competition, the relief of passing tech after spending your life making your car, watching a land rush start, etc...

We're going to try holding small workshops aimed at new members taught by old members. Informal things where an experienced member will request x amount of money to supply each interested member with materials and then he will step by step lead them in making something out of fiberglass or aluminum or wire up something etc. Then the new members get something to keep that they made and also begin to learn a skill. We're hoping that if we space these out right, there will always be sopmething for members to look forward to and keep their interest.

Seems like we do something similar to most teams here. Last year we had pretty bad organization and we were only able to bring on one new member! This year we changed things up alot by attending orientations over summer, setting up for engineering club days and doing presentations for freshmen engineering classes. We had a lot more interest this year so to keep everyone interested and bring those up to speed that know nothing about vehicles or our car, we decided to have weekly presentations about each subsystem so when they come to the shop and see it on the car they have a better understanding and can ask questions.