The Impact Award is many things.
It is the most prestigious award at FIRST. It’s also one of the more unforgiving, labour-intensive, and demanding tasks in FRC – often with very little tangible return. It’s an art form that blends creative writing, formal reporting, public speaking, and videography. It’s an expression of a team’s character and what it values. Teams are made stronger just by attempting it
The 5985 “Impact Perspectives” program was designed to strengthen Impact teams, primarily by using our outsider’s perspective to identify gaps, blind-spots, or bias. Sharing ideas on culture and outreach is just a bonus! After two months working with teams from 6 countries, we’ve identified “4 ways to make Impact powerful”! We’ll cover each of them in a separate post and hope they are helpful.
Powerful Impact #1: Know Yourself
We’ve reviewed a lot of Impact submissions in the last few years. Many suffer from the same problem: they sound wooden – descriptions of activities and work without motivation or direction. They’re technically perfect but lacking some ephemeral quality.
We’ve found one way to address this problem. Fortunately, your team just has to answer two questions:
Who Are You?
What Do You Want?
Unfortunately, both questions have answers that are simple, direct, and sound like a LinkedIn profile. You need to take time on this one…5985 worked on it for several years!
Who Are You? This is way more than where you live, the school you attend, or a catchy team phrase. It’s about the defining character of your team – the things that sit at the heart. For 5985, it became “We are the misfits, the isolated and the bullied”. We took that perspective and carried it through our submission, making it personal and a unique story.
To those that say “there’s nothing special about our team”, we invite you to look deeper. Discover the stories that shaped your team. What do they say when put together?
Recognise your team, write it into your submission, and convey it to the Judges. Your own team’s story will gain power.
What Do You Want? In our experience, many teams initially answer this with some variation of “We want to spread FIRST and/or STEM in our community”. To this, we ask “Why?”. After several rounds of this process we get to a deeper response. For 5985, it became “we fill classrooms with those who miss out. Why? Because that’s who we are”.
Many FRC teams have effective outreach with enthusiastic support. Truly powerful Impact comes when the outreach lines up with motivation. In fact, the best answer to this question can come from looking at where your team gives the most of itself.
Just to be clear, answering these questions is very unlikely to change the nature of your team – but it will help to recognise it. These answers affect your entire Impact submission and help frame your story. It also helps make you memorable.
Stay tuned for the next post!