It's helpful to have somewhere that serves as a one stop shop for all the information that someone attending your event will need, so we created a digital Participant Guide with details on registration, volunteering, time/location and more, all included on a single webpage. At Comet Robotics, we use Gitbook for our documentation, so we used it to create our Participant Guide (and this site). While this is not a free tool, non-profit and/or educational groups like us qualify for their Community plan. If this isn't an option, a simple public Google Doc will also do the job.

Most events including ours use Robot Combat Events to handle registering competitors, and we'd recommend using it too.

Advertising

Once you have one URL like a Robot Combat Events page or Participant Guide, you can refer to this page using links or QR codes in all your future communications, so people have one canonical source to go to for everything about your event.

The most effective way for us to reach potential competitors was on Discord, through servers like the Collegiate Robot Combat Chat, National Havoc Robot League and other region-specific servers for local events. Since we wanted to encourage fellow university participation, we also personally reached out via Discord DMs to fellow collegiate combat robotics orgs that we'd interacted with in the past.

We created Instagram and Discord announcements to encourage our own club members to attend the event as spectators as well.

Communicating Event Updates / Details

As we started getting people registered for the event, we communicated event updates with competitors via a Discord server we created specifically for public events we host, and also via email. Robot Combat Events lets you export a list of emails for registered participants, allowing us to send email blasts with a regular email client.

Branding

Realistically, event branding isn't that important in the grand scheme of things and probably isn't worth putting a lot of effort into if you have limited bandwidth. The graphic design and branding for Comet Clash were done by 3 people. For us, that included shirt designs, signage, social posts, and an event logo.

All you really need is a simple but memorable event name, and maybe a simple event banner graphic for use on your Robot Combat Events page. That could be thrown together in PowerPoint, Google Slides or Canva if you don't have an eye for design. We use a number of different tools, including Figma (free for educational users), Affinity Designer (free for K-12 educational institutions and non-profits), and Procreate.

Here is a Figma file that has most of our design work - feel free to use this for inspiration!

roles you should plan to fill, whether internally with organizing team members or externally recruited volunteers

• todo: list roles

  • mc

  • judge

  • pit runners

  • media / stream

• how to recruit volunteers

• high vis vests or other visual indicators for volunteers / event staff