Tech Day Attendance

[Peter Law]

Hi,

Over the past few years we've noticed a trend towards fewer teams
coming to Tech Days in some areas. While there has been some
speculation over what causes this, we have very little data to base
ideas on.

I'd like to remind anyone running a Tech Day of the trac page [1]
which records attendance numbers, and then suggest some ideas for
improving attendance.

I've updated the page to include some of this year's events. Please
could those who organised the Tech Days back in December update the
page with their numbers.

I've also added an additional Marketing column. I'm expecting to use
this to record additional things we do to get teams to turn up (beyond
it appearing on the website and mentors mentioning it).

Things I think we should be doing:
- Ensure mentors tell their teams (hopefully this also already happens)
- Email the team-leaders
- Publicise the events via our other media: facebook and twitter
- Consider putting the Key Dates back on the homepage
- Querying mentored teams who don't go as to why they didn't

Expanding on some of those a little: I noticed last year that the
Oxford/RAL Tech Day happened to be mentioned in an email to the
team-leaders and subsequently had a good number of teams turn up. This
year we haven't announced it and there are only a couple of teams
expected to be there.

I can't find our facebook page right now, but our Twitter account has
over 200 followers. Even if we assume that half of those are previous
competitors and Blueshirts, that's still 100 people who want to hear
about the things we're doing.

I also personally find it quite annoying that the key dates aren't on
the homepage of our website. Despite only being a single link away,
they feel much more hidden than they used to.

I think everyone agrees that Tech Days substantially benefit the teams
who do attend, and want them to feel worthwhile for those organising
them. Let's see if we can ensure we help as many teams as we can.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Peter

[1] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/wiki/Tech%20Days/Attendance

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

On 09/01/16 11:17, Peter Law wrote:
> Over the past few years we've noticed a trend towards fewer teams
> coming to Tech Days in some areas. While there has been some
> speculation over what causes this, we have very little data to base
> ideas on.

Indeedy; one thing I'd suggest is that it's not always clear to teams
what goes on at a tech day. If we could define it in terms of what teams
already have done (i.e., most have been to Kickstart) it might be
better. (Random speculation here).

> Expanding on some of those a little: I noticed last year that the
> Oxford/RAL Tech Day happened to be mentioned in an email to the
> team-leaders and subsequently had a good number of teams turn up. This
> year we haven't announced it and there are only a couple of teams
> expected to be there.

NB: I wasn't aware there was a Oxford tech day (dunno if I missed an
email or something). One possibility is have a {pseudo-,}automated
fortnightly email to teams letting them know what events are coming up,
but I suspect they'll all be ignored on the grounds of repetition.

It's better to announce to the most relevant people in the subject line;
pumping all such emails through me is a recipe for delays though. IMO,
better is if we define a real procedure/checklist for running a tech day
[0] that stipulates an announcement email some distance out, and that
the organizer should be the one to send it. From what I've observed,
this seems to work for Bristol.

(That then couples with the fact that we've failed to define "Who are
Oxford?" in general).

> I can't find our facebook page right now, but our Twitter account has
> over 200 followers. Even if we assume that half of those are previous
> competitors and Blueshirts, that's still 100 people who want to hear
> about the things we're doing.

Something something social media on my lawn; I've no idea if this would
be effective but should probably be tried.

> I also personally find it quite annoying that the key dates aren't on
> the homepage of our website. Despite only being a single link away,
> they feel much more hidden than they used to.

I think the new homepage is an improvement on before; I think it can be
improved further with more details on dates. IMO there's no good place
to wedge them in though; perhaps some hideous
roll-over-to-see-more-dates thing would be appropriate?

[0] It occurs to me that this suggestion has likely happened before and
I've likely forgotten it,

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Peter Law]

Hi,

Jeremy wrote:
> Indeedy; one thing I'd suggest is that it's not always clear to teams
> what goes on at a tech day. If we could define it in terms of what teams
> already have done (i.e., most have been to Kickstart) it might be
> better. (Random speculation here).

Fair point. This is something which I think we used to do a fairly
good job of advertising at Kickstart, but have possibly been missing
out more recently. The info on the website [A] is still accurate, if
not the easiest to find.

> One possibility is have a {pseudo-,}automated
> fortnightly email to teams letting them know what events are coming up,
> but I suspect they'll all be ignored on the grounds of repetition.
>
> It's better to announce to the most relevant people in the subject line;
> pumping all such emails through me is a recipe for delays though. IMO,
> better is if we define a real procedure/checklist for running a tech day
> [0] that stipulates an announcement email some distance out, and that
> the organizer should be the one to send it. From what I've observed,
> this seems to work for Bristol.

Having a checklist is something which I think has been mentioned
before, but none have been created. It looks like there's some info on
the relevant trac page [B], though it could use some more detail and
better knowledge that it exists.

It's great to hear that this setup does indeed work for Bristol, as
that proves it's worth investing the time in making a standard
practise.

I agree that a regular events email to everyone is likely to end up
being ignored, though wonder if we could allow people to define which
areas they're interested in getting news from when they sign up (and
possibly exposing this via srobo.org/userman too).
We'd then send out an email about the Tech Days a month in advance to
the interested parties as part of the planning. If we store the region
preferences as LDAP groups we could then use fritter to send the
emails.

> (That then couples with the fact that we've failed to define "Who are
> Oxford?" in general).

This is very much true. However, given that my local (Newbury) team
have been to events in both Bristol and Southampton, plus the previous
RAL Tech Day got a team from much further north (Rugby?), I'm not sure
this is actually too much of an issue in this regard.

In particular if we let the competitors define their own regions of
interest (as suggested above) it seems even less of an issue for Tech
Days.

>> I also personally find it quite annoying that the key dates aren't on
>> the homepage of our website. Despite only being a single link away,
>> they feel much more hidden than they used to.
>
> I think the new homepage is an improvement on before; I think it can be
> improved further with more details on dates. IMO there's no good place
> to wedge them in though; perhaps some hideous
> roll-over-to-see-more-dates thing would be appropriate?

I'm not sure, and this probably deserves its own thread. One fix could
be to add a Key Dates link to the top list of pages (Home, IDE, Docs,
etc.). Another alternative might be to have a mini news item for each
Tech Day as it appears, so that they're in the Latest News section. As
it stands, the Latest News is embarrassingly out of date anyway.

Thanks,
Peter

[A] https://www.studentrobotics.org/events/tech_days
[B] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/wiki/Tech%20Days

[Peter Law]

Hi,

I wrote:
>> Over the past few years we've noticed a trend towards fewer teams
>> coming to Tech Days in some areas. While there has been some
>> speculation over what causes this, we have very little data to base
>> ideas on.

Having been to a couple of Tech Days recently (one of which I
organised), with some variation in the success rate we now have some
more data to base opinions on. I've also noted some things which could
be improved upon.

In general I think that things have improved, with increased
attendance at the more recent Tech Days since we sent out the email
batch in Jan/Feb. I've also seen comments from teachers that they only
knew the events were happening as a result of these emails.

Jeremy wrote:
> Indeedy; one thing I'd suggest is that it's not always clear to teams
> what goes on at a tech day. If we could define it in terms of what teams
> already have done (i.e., most have been to Kickstart) it might be
> better. (Random speculation here).

I was originally sceptical that this was an issue (since we do have
some information on the website [A]), but recent experiences suggest
we can improve.

In particular, the failure-modes we should cope with are:
- teams turning up without a team-leader
- teams not turning up without telling us
- teams having issues on arrival
- teams turning up without tools

The first of these is clearly an issue since it puts Blueshirts in a
position where they could be considered responsible for the young
people, which is something I believe we try to avoid. This is
something which I think we include in the ToS document which
team-leaders are given, though it appears we need to make this
clearer.

Teams which are unable to come isn't that much of an issue, though it
is annoying. It could also result in us expending resources to
accommodate teams which then don't turn up, resulting in wasted effort
etc. Clearly we wouldn't mind as much if the teams let us know ahead
of time.

In the case of the RAL tech day, teams needed to negotiate the on-site
security before being allowed into the building. While security were
able to contact us, we realised that we should have given the teams a
contact name at RAL as well as a phone number in case of issues.

In the last case, a team turned up with the expectation that tools
would be provided. I think this assumption was based on us having some
tools available at Kickstart, which they also seemed to think was a
tech day.

All of these could probably be addressed by encouraging more
communication between teams and the organising Blueshirt, as well as
clarifying what the expectations for attending an event should be. At
a minimum I think we should move to expecting that teams inform us
that they're coming to a tech day (rather than this mostly only being
done for ones hosted by 3rd parties) and we should get a direct
(mobile) phone number for the team-leader who is brining the
competitors.

Thoughts?

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

On 12/03/16 20:23, Peter Law wrote:
> In general I think that things have improved, with increased
> attendance at the more recent Tech Days since we sent out the email
> batch in Jan/Feb. I've also seen comments from teachers that they only
> knew the events were happening as a result of these emails.

Huzzah. I suspect we can only get complete school coverage through
printing flyers, attaching them to bricks, and then heaving them at people.

> Jeremy wrote:
>> Indeedy; one thing I'd suggest is that it's not always clear to teams
>> what goes on at a tech day. If we could define it in terms of what teams
>> already have done (i.e., most have been to Kickstart) it might be
>> better. (Random speculation here).
>
> I was originally sceptical that this was an issue (since we do have
> some information on the website [A]), but recent experiences suggest
> we can improve.

[My opinion was motivated by an occurrence where a team turned up in
Southampton without their robot,]

> In particular, the failure-modes we should cope with are:
> - teams turning up without a team-leader
> - teams not turning up without telling us
> - teams having issues on arrival
> - teams turning up without tools
>
> The first of these is clearly an issue since it puts Blueshirts in a
> position where they could be considered responsible for the young
> people, which is something I believe we try to avoid. This is
> something which I think we include in the ToS document which
> team-leaders are given, though it appears we need to make this
> clearer.

Yar. I don't believe we can eliminate this happening as most competitors
are free-range anyway, but we can at least define what happens when it
does, and lay the blame squarely on the team-leader.

> Teams which are unable to come isn't that much of an issue, though it
> is annoying. It could also result in us expending resources to
> accommodate teams which then don't turn up, resulting in wasted effort
> etc. Clearly we wouldn't mind as much if the teams let us know ahead
> of time.
>
> In the case of the RAL tech day, teams needed to negotiate the on-site
> security before being allowed into the building. While security were
> able to contact us, we realised that we should have given the teams a
> contact name at RAL as well as a phone number in case of issues.

Indeed -- named person + contact number in charge of every event would
be good.

> In the last case, a team turned up with the expectation that tools
> would be provided. I think this assumption was based on us having some
> tools available at Kickstart, which they also seemed to think was a
> tech day.
>
> All of these could probably be addressed by encouraging more
> communication between teams and the organising Blueshirt, as well as
> clarifying what the expectations for attending an event should be. At
> a minimum I think we should move to expecting that teams inform us
> that they're coming to a tech day (rather than this mostly only being
> done for ones hosted by 3rd parties) and we should get a direct
> (mobile) phone number for the team-leader who is brining the
> competitors.

How about a checklist for teams attending tech-days? Unfortunately we
can't force them to actually use it though. Perhaps some kind of
mandatory registration process for tech days?

Many thanks for organizing tech days.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Peter Law]

Hi,

Jeremy wrote:
> How about a checklist for teams attending tech-days? Unfortunately we
> can't force them to actually use it though. Perhaps some kind of
> mandatory registration process for tech days?

This reminds me of something which a team-leader (at the team I
mentor) asked recently. Following a discussion of whether the
team-members got our announcement emails, he then wondered whether we
publish the dates of the events on some kind of feed. Doing that turns
out to be part of what #1302 suggests, though when I mentioned that we
do (sometimes) emit them via Twitter/Facebook [1] he seemed to think
that was enough.

The link there is that:
- once we have these things in people's calendars, from a feed which
we control, we could then include in the event details said checklist
of things to bring.
- once we have a list of people we're expecting, we could (possibly
automatically) send them email reminders about the event.

I think that we should aim to keep any registration process as
lightweight as possible, though I think it's reasonable to require
that they do register.

Whether any or all of those could be achieved via some existing
service or software also seems worth investigating. While it would be
easy enough to write these ourselves, this is definitely heading into
the domain of general event-organisation, which feels like it should
already have been solved.

Thanks,
Peter

#1302: https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/ticket/1302
[1] I strongly feel we need to do more of this!