The Outreach & Community Engagement Path
The Connect, Motivate, and Inspire engine of an FTC team. This is the work that turns a robotics team into something a community actually cares about — and the work that judges recognize as the difference between a good team and a great one.
Every FTC team builds a robot. The teams that advance past the first qualifier — the ones that earn the Connect Award, the Motivate Award, and ultimately the Inspire Award — are the ones that built something beyond the robot. They built relationships. They mentored younger students. They showed up in their community with the robot and a story worth telling. And they documented every bit of it in a way judges could point to.
Outreach is not optional extra credit. Under the FTC points-based advancement system, the Inspire Award is worth 60 advancement points — more than winning the entire field competition. No team wins the Inspire Award without a strong outreach record. The Connect and Motivate Awards, each worth 12 points at first place, are won entirely on the strength of what you did in your community and how well you documented it. This path teaches you how to do that work seriously, from the first week of the season to the final qualifier.
What This Path Feeds
Three Awards That Cannot Be Won Without Real Outreach
Connect Award
Given to the team that most meaningfully connects with the engineering and STEM community outside of FIRST. Real partnerships — not just logo placements. Engineers who mentor. Organizations that host events. Relationships that continue past the season.
Motivate Award
Given to the team that best embodies the FIRST spirit — recruiting new students, supporting competitors, bringing energy to every event, and spreading the FIRST message into places it has not reached before.
Inspire Award
The grand prize. Worth 60 advancement points — more than winning the field. No team wins Inspire without a portfolio and a presentation that demonstrate meaningful, documented community impact alongside competitive engineering. Outreach is not a bonus section. It is a core requirement.
The Reality of Outreach
This Is a Season-Long Commitment, Not a Pre-Tournament Sprint
You Cannot Document What Did Not Happen
The same principle that applies to the Engineering Portfolio applies here: judges can tell the difference between a team that did outreach all season and a team that scrambled to fill in the outreach section of the portfolio two weeks before the qualifier. Names matter. Dates matter. Attendance numbers matter. Quotes from the people you served matter. None of that can be manufactured after the fact.
Start in September. Run your first outreach event before the end of October. Keep a running log of every event, every partnership contact, every student you mentored. The portfolio section and the judges’ room answer both write themselves if the documentation exists. They are nearly impossible to fake if it does not.
The Left Brain Connection
Outreach Events Are More Compelling When the Robot Is There
Bring the Robot. Bring the Builders.
The most effective outreach events are not Right Brain students talking about their team in a gymnasium. They are the whole team — or at least a meaningful cross-section of it — with a working robot, a driver, an engineer who can answer questions, and a communicator who can tell the story to an audience that has never heard of FTC.
This means the Outreach lead needs to coordinate with the Left Brain team for every significant event. Which robot will be there? Is it competition-ready or a demo version? Who is driving? Who answers technical questions from the crowd? These logistics need to be settled in advance, not on the day of the event.
The Left Brain team’s involvement in outreach events also strengthens the judges’ presentation. When a judge asks “who ran your outreach events?” and a Left Brain builder raises their hand alongside a Right Brain communicator, that is a stronger answer than “the Right Brain team handled all of that.” FIRST wants whole teams in the community — not just the students who are comfortable with a microphone.
The Five-Stage Journey
How to Build a Season-Long Outreach Program That Judges Recognize
Study What Award-Winning Outreach Actually Looks Like
Before you plan a single event, understand what judges are evaluating. Read the Connect Award and Motivate Award rubrics in the FTC Game Manual. Then find two or three teams that have won those awards — look at their engineering portfolios if they are public, read their Chairman’s Award submissions if accessible, and watch their judges’ room presentations on YouTube if available.
The pattern you will find in every strong outreach record: specificity. Not “we did community events” but “we ran a robotics demo for 47 third-graders at Port St. Joe Elementary on October 14th, partnered with the Apalachicola Bay Chamber of Commerce for a STEM showcase on November 2nd, and mentored FLL Team 1428 through three practice sessions in December.” Names, dates, numbers, outcomes. That is what judges write down.
Build Your Outreach Calendar for the Season
Outreach does not happen by accident. It happens because someone put it on the calendar in September and held the team to it. The Outreach lead’s first job is to map the entire season — from kickoff to the qualifying tournament — and identify where outreach events can realistically fit around build sessions, school schedules, and league meets.
Aim for at least one meaningful outreach event per month from September through December. Identify at least two categories of outreach: events where you bring FIRST to a new audience (library demos, school STEM nights, community fairs), and partnerships where you build an ongoing relationship (mentoring an FLL team, recurring visits to a civic organization, a sponsor who sends engineers to your build sessions). Both categories matter to judges. One-time events show energy. Ongoing partnerships show depth.
Build Your Partnership Network — Before You Need It
The Connect Award is specifically about relationships with the STEM and engineering community outside of FIRST. Sponsors who write checks are not enough. Judges want to see engineers who mentored your team, universities that hosted your events, companies that sent professionals to talk with your students, and organizations that partnered with you on something real.
Start reaching out in September — not November. Local libraries, elementary and middle schools, civic organizations like Rotary or the Chamber of Commerce, engineering firms, community colleges, and healthcare or aerospace companies are all potential partners. The ask is simple: let us bring our robot to your space and show your audience what FIRST is. Most will say yes. The ones who say yes become the relationships worth writing about in the portfolio.
Every outreach contact gets a name, a date, a description of what was done, and a follow-up note about the ongoing relationship. If there is no ongoing relationship, it is a one-time event — valuable, but worth less to judges than a partnership that continued across the season.
Plan, Run, and Document Each Event — Every Single Time
Every outreach event follows the same cycle: plan it, run it, document it, and integrate the documentation into the portfolio. The planning is simple — date, location, target audience, what you are doing, who from the team is attending, what robot or materials you need, and who is responsible for each piece. The running is the event itself. The documentation is where most teams fall short.
At every event, someone is responsible for photography — real photos, not blurry phone shots from across the room. Someone counts the attendees. Someone collects a quote or a brief testimonial from the organizer or a participant. Someone writes two to three sentences about what happened and what impact it had before the team leaves the parking lot. If you wait until you are writing the portfolio to reconstruct what happened at an event three months ago, you will produce a generic summary that judges have read a hundred times. The specific, vivid documentation written the day of is what makes a portfolio section come alive.
Integrate Everything into the Portfolio — and Practice Presenting It
By the time the portfolio deadline arrives, the outreach section should practically write itself — because the documentation was done in real time at every event. The Outreach lead’s final job is to assemble those event sheets, partnership logs, and photos into the portfolio pages, and to make sure the narrative connects the dots: not just what we did, but why we did it, what impact it had, and how it reflects the values of the team and of FIRST.
Then practice presenting it out loud. The judges’ room answer to “tell me about your outreach” should take sixty seconds and include at least three specific events with specific numbers. The Outreach lead owns this answer in the presentation — but the Left Brain students standing in the room should be able to name the events they attended, because they were there. This is the thread that runs through all three Right Brain paths: the team is one team, and the outreach belongs to everyone who showed up.
What to Capture at Every Event
The Documentation Checklist — Do This Before You Leave the Parking Lot
| What to Capture | Why It Matters to Judges |
|---|---|
| Date, location, and event name | Establishes a credible, verifiable record. Vague entries raise flags. |
| Attendance count | Judges want to see scale. “47 students” is more convincing than “a school visit.” |
| Which team members attended | Confirms student involvement. Judges notice when only Right Brain students appear. |
| 3–5 clear photos | Students with the robot, students interacting with the community, candid moments. Cropped tight, no clutter. |
| One quote from an organizer or participant | Third-party validation. A librarian saying “the kids were amazed” is worth more than the team saying it about themselves. |
| 2–3 sentence impact summary | Written the day of, in plain language. What happened, who was there, what changed. Drop this directly into the portfolio. |
| Follow-up action | Did this event create an ongoing relationship? A return visit? A sponsor lead? Note it. Judges reward continuity. |
The Standard
What a Competitive Outreach Record Looks Like by Tournament Day
When you walk into the qualifying tournament, your outreach section of the portfolio should show: a minimum of four to six documented events across the season, at least two ongoing partnerships with named contacts and continuing relationships, at least one event where Left Brain and Right Brain team members attended together, measurable impact numbers (students reached, events run, hours volunteered), and a narrative that explains how all of it reflects the team’s values and FIRST’s mission.
If a judge asks “tell me about your outreach” and the answer takes sixty seconds and includes specific names, dates, and numbers — that is a competitive answer. If the answer is “we did a few demos and helped with an FLL event” — that is not.
Keep These Open While You Work
Related pages on this site and external resources:
📋 The Engineering Portfolio Path — the outreach section lives here; build both at the same time → 🎤 The Judges-Room Presentation Path — you will present your outreach record in the room; practice it there → ⚖️ Judges, Awards & Scoring — the Connect and Motivate Award rubrics in full detail → 📄 The Most Important Document — how the outreach section fits into the 15-page portfolio → 🔗 FIRST FTC Team Resources — official outreach toolkit and Connect Award guidance →Ready to Start Building Your Outreach Program?
Your first outreach event should happen before the end of October. If you are not sure where to start, reach out — we can help you identify local partners, plan your first event, and set up a documentation system that will serve the whole season.
✉ Email the Coach Engineering Portfolio Path →Robots start conversations. Outreach sustains them. The teams that go to State are not always the ones with the fastest robot or the most polished portfolio — they are the ones that made their community care about what they were doing, and had the documentation to prove it.