Ok so school is starting up and many clubs are introducing fees to join.
Our middle school charges 150 dollars to do Vex IQ and our intermediate school charges 450 dollars to do Vex IQ (both have had it for 4-3 years). At the high school, we will probably charge 30 dollars to do Vex EDR (This will be its first year as an official club).
I was wondering what other Vex clubs where charging to join?
Haha none
none
Private club - $500
That’s a lot
Qmar
The cost depends on what your organization hopes to receive out of it. Its smart to organize your costs inlcuding robot cost/competition. Then to figure out where the money will come from :school/family/working/donation
Cost Example
School funded
- Competition costs 2.Hotel rooms 3.Extra parts (sensors specific to a team/robot)
Example cost $400 for hotels (varies for the amount you attend)
Non-School funded (club)
1.General robot cost (ex. robot generally costs 2~2.5k split between X number of people) 2. Competition cost 3. Hotel rooms
Example cost $400 to join + $400 for hotels (varies for the amount you attend)
Fully independent
1.All costs have to be covered by you
Example cost $2.5k + 1k for competitions ( if you attend worlds )
Again these are all rough answers
Important Set up fundraisers and work jobs if you need help paying
If anyone wants help contact me at @266julianmiller on IG, I am a fully independent team that worked jobs to pay for my team, and can share recorded costs.
I have never been a fan of membership fees but obviously it is something you have to do sometimes. My HS team asked everyone to give 100 $ as we were preparing for worlds(members had already been on team 6 months) but we knew who was willing to do it no problem and who just could not afford it. It was only student organized any we were pretty forgiving about it.
Think about how much you have to spend on parts? If it is the only source of money for a team the fees have to be quite high.
none. If it helps we have found that fundraising is not always the best way forward when looking to offset the relatively large amount of money that these clubs take. What we found was that if we truly spent time looking for local and non-local grants it was not too terrible hard. Look to what the sports teams of your school are doing and copy them. Another great venture is to get a presentation about your club and its members and ask local businesses for donations. Many already donate to local sports teams and will be more than likely willing to donate to you. However remember that your team probably does not have the greatest public exposure and their donations may not be seen. So naturally some may not want to donate. Just keep at it and remember to always be polite.
There is no fee to join for my school. The club was predominantly created for people in our school to just come in and try something new that they wouldn’t have tried otherwise. An entrance fee would defeat the purpose of getting people to try new things, because I don’t know many average teenager who would pay money to try something that they may not like. As for cost, all we have is our school and 1 sponsor and 2-3 fundraisers every year we do fine every year (We have 4 teams to pay for). The amount of people coming in does get crazy though 
Our HS-based after-school club is able to put 2-3 teams into play each year from a single week STEM summer camp. If you have a teacher/mentor that can lead that sort of camp, and throw lots of student team members in to spread the work load, its a great way to generate $3-5k.
At the high school, we only had enough to build 1 complete robot last year and will now expand it to 2. I have gotten a bill of materials for it of 900 dollars (we had a Cortex for it and that stuff). Our school bought us a field and will try to host a competition this year(probably using another field from another school).
How much money would we get from the competition. Maybe 40 teams in it.
We don’t know how to ask for sponsors, but it would be great if we did. As that would lower the cost.
To be honest, I don’t want a club fee, but I think we need it.
We charge $375 each roboteer for VRC or IQ and non-local event costs are on the team attending.
We have to pay for warehouse space along with the normal parts and competition expenses.
I wish we didn’t have to charge so much. We just became a non-profit so I am writing grant proposals right and left. Hopefully, we will be able to cover our expenses through grants and donations.
Our fees cover a lot - two robots plus spares, registration fees, team tee shirt, snacks and drinks for meetings, lunches at tournaments, lunches for extra-long meetings (during the summer and school holidays), competition field. However, we have a private team so membership is optional. The school team is free.
That being said, there are kids on our team that also do travel sports, dance, gynmastics, musical instruments, etc and the fees for those types of activities dwarf the fee we charge for our team. Plus, it could be argued that what the kids learn in robotics will benefit them more in a STEM career than travel sports and dance. Of course, I value sports, music and arts to develop a well rounded individual. I’m only saying that the kids on my team are getting a great value. The parents need to consider that when shelling out the $$ for our team.
Vex- $150
Vex Jr.- $120 (A junior vex clawbot instructional course for 6th graders.)
+1 to this! For us, $375 for 8 months is a steal compared to the other sports. If we had food and such it would be as much I guess.
"Travel Robotics’ is how we describe it and people start getting it.
There are some old threads with teams made by teams like yours who would benefit from asking around locally.
None for VEX Team Virus. Our students buy their own shirts, and pay their own travel expenses. Otherwise, we have lots of sponsors.
150$ per kid.
none, we just have good sponsors…
We raise and pay for all of our events and travel. We will do 18 events this year and have 5 teams with 17 students. Each student is responsible for helping fundraise or get sponsors for 1000 a student.
We luckily get 5-6000 of our 20k budget from sponsors.