Okay, this topic may be a tad bit controversial, but this is just me having a thought experiment!
As I’m starting to write this, it’s 5:43 am on a Saturday, in less than an hour I’m going to drive 40 minutes across town to go volunteer for at least 10 hours at a First Tech Challenge (FTC) double meet. For those that don’t know, a meet for FTC is when 12 teams get together for half a day to run matches. A double meet means there’s 12 teams in the morning and 12 in the afternoon.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m probably going to enjoy today immensely. I get to hang out with some friends, watch robots compete, and help some kids possibly get inspired to pursue STEM in the future. BUT there’s part of me that’s been dreading spending a whole Saturday volunteering when I could be doing a million other things.
Also, I’m “volunteering” at an event that the teams competing at all paid for. Am I the only one that finds that kind of strange? There’s no other sport in the United States that you’d expect the referees to show up to a sanctioned event for free. So this blog post is just me walking through what it would take to pay the volunteers at the event.
The questions that need to be answered:
- How much should they be paid?
- I’m going to assume that everyone gets paid $20 an hour for simplicity
- How many hours are required?
- This is a tricky question, there’s a significant number of hours needed to plan an event, then there’s setup, tear down, and then there’s actually running the event. I don’t know about the planning so I’m going to stick to setup, run, tear down
- 4 hours (x4 people) for setup
- 10 hours (x???) for run
- 1 hour (x???) for tear down
- How many people doing what roles? (there were 22 volunteers at the event)
- FTA (field tech advisor)
- Lead Scorekeeper
- Head Referee
- Lead Robot Inspector
- Robot Inspector
- Referee
- Scorekeeper
- Field Reset
- Lead Queuer
- Queuer
- Emcee
- Volunteer Registration Assistant
- Team Registration
- Income from event
- Missouri registration costs $225 for 2 meets and a qualifier
- Let’s say $105 goes to qualifier (much larger even) and $60 for each meet
- 24 * 60 = $1,440
- Concessions (guess that each team has 8 people attending and average $4 spent per person)
- 8 * 4 * 24 = $768
- Total (guessed): $2208
- Missouri registration costs $225 for 2 meets and a qualifier
- Event expenses
- Venue? Middle school is donated from host team
- Fields? $450 for a game set, $659 field perimeter. Going to say it $100 an event since it’s reused so much
- Audio visual? It’s owned by the local FIRST partner, going to just guestimate it averages at $100 per event
- Volunteer food? ~$200
- If you paid your volunteers, how much would it cost?
- Setup: 4 x 4 x 20 = $320
- Run: 22 x 10 x 20 = $4,400
- Teardown 10 x 1 x 20 = $200
- Total: $4920
So guesstimate net from local registration is $1800 and the approximate cost is $4920 to pay volunteers. Those two numbers are pretty far off and I assume there’s a lot of expenses for the local delivery partner that I don’t know about.
The way the payments from teams are structured, paying the current volunteers just doesn’t work out.
So, if FIRST wanted to change from to paid employees/contractors running the event, what would it look like?
Option A: just increase costs for teams
- $4920 / 24 = $205.00 per team per meet
- $205 + $205 + $360 (for qualifier) = $770 yearly increase for most teams
Option B: Reduce staff needed
- Drop to 2 refs, 2 score keepers and 1 FTA
- Host Team would be responsible for setting up and providing field, queuing themselves, solving their own technical problems, providing a emcee
- FTA and refs would have additional responsibility of inspection, team check in, field reset
- 5 * 10 * 20 = $1,000 to pay staff
- $1000 / 24 = $41.67 per team
Option A would be a very hard pill to swallow for most FTC teams. It wouldn’t be impossible for them to find that extra money, either from their school, sponsor or students. BUT there would be some teams where they can’t afford that extra.
Option B degrades the experience for both the teams and the folks working the event. Teams wouldn’t have the technical help they need to get through an event. The event its self would likely be delayed/run slower. The staff would likely be even more stressed, and have much more pressure coming from teams and parents.
Conclusion
I think both options have solvable issues and likely a mixture of the two is what would be the most feasible solution to wanting to compensate current volunteers.
But am I about to start advocating for it? No, I don’t think so. At least in my local area, it seems like there’s plenty of people that show up to volunteer. Teams show the volunteers a lot of respect and the time I had as a volunteer was actually pretty enjoyable. I do think it limits the growth of the program though, there’s only so many people that would be willing to volunteer and the numbers don’t support having a team in every single school.