Mini-Project: An Outreach Event Playbook You Can Reuse

Judges reward outreach that is effective, scalable, sustainable, and creative — the exact words from the executive-summary prompt on spreading the FIRST Mission. The way to hit all four is to stop running one-off events and start running a playbook : a documented template you can drop into any school, library, or partner site. This mini-project builds one.

The playbook document. Create a one-page template with these sections, then fill it for one real event you can run this spring:

1. Goal & definition term. Which official term does this serve? A library demo is Reached and possibly Advocated ; a rookie build day is Started or Mentored ; a tournament you own is Host. Pick one primary term so the event has a clear rubric mapping.
2. Target audience & count goal. e.g. ‘Reach 60 students, grades 4-6, Title I school.’ A number you can later verify.
3. Run-of-show (timed). Minute-by-minute: 0:00 intro, 0:10 driving demo, 0:25 hands-on station rotation, 0:50 ‘how to join FIRST’ pitch, 1:00 close.
4. Materials checklist. Robot, battery + charger, bumpers, demo controller, sign-in sheet, QR code to your FLL/FTC interest form.
5. Measurement plan. Sign-in sheet (counts), a 3-question exit slip (‘Had you heard of FIRST?’, ‘Would you join?’), and a photo/quote capture assignment for one student.
6. Documentation outputs. What lands in your tracker: people reached, hours, one quote, one photo, partner contact — already in documentation-form format.

The scalability test. A playbook is only good if another student can run it without you. Hand your draft to a teammate who was not involved and ask them to run a dry run from the document alone. Every place they get stuck is a gap to fix. This is exactly how Team 5985 turned weekly LEGO classes into a program running ‘in 38 venues and online’ — the format was documented enough that many people could deliver it. They even built ‘128 PB-created lessons’ so the curriculum itself was reusable.

The sustainability hook. Add a built-in pipeline: every event ends with a clear next step (‘come to our open build night’, QR to a form). 5985 reports that year-round classes raise ‘83% of PB recruits’ — outreach that feeds the team is outreach that lasts, and that is a powerful sustainability story.

Creativity counts. The ‘creative’ criterion is met by a memorable hook, not a gimmick. 5985’s LEGO robots ‘fight pirates and play the Royal Game of Ur’ — a creative link to a real board game dating to roughly 2600 BCE. Give your playbook one signature element kids will talk about.

Deliverable: a finished, tested playbook plus the filled tracker row from running it once. Now you can clone it ten times and report ‘10 events, 600 students reached’ with documentation for every one.

Key takeaways

• Turn one-off events into a reusable, documented playbook mapped to a single official definition term — that is how outreach becomes scalable and sustainable.
• Bake measurement (sign-in counts, exit slips, one quote, one photo) into the run-of-show so every event auto-feeds your tracker and documentation form.
• Test scalability by having an uninvolved teammate run it from the doc alone, and add a recruiting next-step so outreach feeds the team.

This lesson was adapted from learnfrc.com.