Incredibots Academy

A grant is money an organisation has already committed to giving away. Nobody has to be persuaded to create a budget — it exists, and you are competing for a share. That changes the strategy completely.

Finding and writing grants· Official FIRST · Fundraising Toolkit · 2014 · 17 minWatch on YouTube

Two kinds of grant

General community grants: Offered by foundations, corporate giving programmes, and civic organisations for broad causes — youth development, STEM education, community betterment. You are competing against every nonprofit in your area, many of them professionally staffed.

FIRST-specific and product grants: Reserved for FIRST teams, or offered by companies whose products teams use. A far smaller applicant pool, and the questions are ones you are unusually well placed to answer.

Rookie grants covering registration belong to the second category and are the highest-value application you will make all year. Apply the moment they open.

The current list lives in one place. FIRST Team Grant Opportunities is the authoritative, regularly updated list of grants open to FTC teams: sponsor, amount, eligibility, and application window. Check it at the start of every season and again mid-season, because new programmes are posted throughout the year.

Volume is the strategy

Grant applications ask the same handful of questions, over and over: describe your team, describe your outreach, describe your impact, describe what the money would fund.

Write strong baseline narrative blocks once, keep them in a shared document, and adapt per application. Maintain blocks for:

Team introduction — who you are, how long you have run, structure
Outreach programmes and the numbers behind them
Season budget and what specific funds would cover
Your mission and why STEM access matters locally
Past achievements, including competition results and awards

The first application takes hours. The tenth takes twenty minutes, because you are editing rather than composing. That asymmetry is the whole game — apply to as many as you reasonably can, because your cost per application collapses while the payoff per acceptance does not.

Adapt, do not paste blindly

Reuse is not the same as ignoring the question. Grant reviewers read a lot of applications and can tell instantly when a generic block was dropped in without answering what was asked. Always rewrite the opening and closing sentences to address the actual question and the actual organisation.

Grant cycles open and close on fixed dates, often months before the season. A shared calendar with every deadline, plus a reminder two weeks out, is the difference between applying to fifteen grants and remembering four of them in March.

Winning the niche ones

Some grants ask a question most applicants have to bluff: how do you use our product?

If your team genuinely runs on Onshape and you apply for their FIRST grant, you can answer honestly and in detail, which parts you modelled, how your assemblies are structured, how it changed your build process. If you genuinely use a sheet-metal fabrication service for your drivetrain plates, you can describe the parts and show photos.

That specificity is very hard to fake and it wins applications that are weaker on other measures. Reviewers at these companies are frequently engineers who can tell the difference immediately.

Read eligibility before you write a word

A large share of the corporate grants on the FIRST list are restricted to teams with an employee mentor at that company, or teams near one of its sites. Several big names appear there every year on exactly those terms. Survey where your families work before you start writing, an employer match can move you from ineligible to a very small applicant pool.

So go through the software and services your team already uses every week — CAD, fabrication, PCB manufacturing, 3D printing, project management, design tools. A surprising number run grant programmes for student teams, and you are already the ideal applicant. This is the highest-yield hour of grant research available to you.

Passive matching — money you already earned

This is the easiest money in the entire track, and most teams never claim any of it. It requires no pitch. It requires nonprofit status and somebody filling in a form.

Employee donation matching: Many large employers match charitable donations made by their staff, often one-to-one and sometimes more. A parent donates $100 to your team, the company adds $100. Some match donations made by retirees and spouses too.

Volunteer stipends: Many of the same employers donate a fixed amount per hour their employees volunteer with a nonprofit. A mentor who works at a large tech company and spends two evenings a week with your team can be worth a substantial sum across a season, for hours they were already giving you for free.

Double the Donation maintains a searchable database of company matching and volunteer-grant programmes. Type in an employer and it tells you the match ratio, the caps, and how to submit — it is the fastest way to find out whether a parent's employer participates.

How to actually claim it

Confirm your umbrella nonprofit is registered with the major corporate donor platforms. Benevity is the most common; large regional FIRST organisations and established umbrella nonprofits are usually already on it. Find your organisation's exact registered name and tax ID, because that is what people will need to search for.
Survey where your families work. Ask every parent, mentor, and volunteer for their employer. Most people have no idea their company runs these programmes.
Look up each employer's programme and note the match ratio, the annual cap per employee, and the submission deadline. Caps and deadlines are where teams lose money they had already technically earned.
Give people the exact details they need — organisation name, tax ID, and a one-line description, in a message they can forward. Every extra step of research you leave to a volunteer loses you some of them.
Log volunteer hours from day one. Retroactive hour logging is difficult and usually capped. A simple shared sheet from the first meeting captures the whole season.

If a sponsor sends a physical cheque

It must be made out to your umbrella nonprofit, not to your team, because your team is not itself a legal entity. Ask them to write your team name and number in the memo field so it gets routed to your account rather than sitting unidentified in a general fund.

Check yourself

A mentor volunteers with your team two evenings a week and works for a large tech employer. What should you do first?

Corporate money is slow and seasonal. Next unit: raising money yourself, in your own community.