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Organizer Guide

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Hi! We're Comet Robotics, a student organization at UT Dallas. This is the Organizer Guide, where we'll take you through the process of running a combat robotics competition. All the information provided is based on our experience organizing Comet Clash 2024, where we hosted over 50 robots for one day of epic robot fighting. This guide was created to serve as a reference guide for event organizers, and we hope that this guide inspires you and helps you to get started with running your own event! But first, one important question...

Are you sure you want to run an event?

Running any sort of large event will probably be stressful and take longer than you expect. We made an unfathomable amount of emails and phone calls to make sure the logistics of our event were sound and secure. We spent hours on hours in the summer and during the school year figuring out how to make our event run smoothly and successfully. We don't say this to scare you, but we think it's important to know what you're getting into.

We started planning Comet Clash in June 2024 - 5 months before the event in November 2024. That might seem like a while, but all the planning in the world won't prepare you for the chaos and random stuff that will pop up before and during your event. Additionally, with our organizing team being students, we have to consider that our capacity to work on the event decreases significantly as classes start back up again.

These challenges make it all the more important to remember why you're choosing to run an event in the first place. Seeing people walk through the doors of our venue on the morning of our event, meeting fellow combat robotics enthusiasts, and seeing how much fun the competition was, made the months of planning and coordination worth it. Ready to get the ball rolling? Head to the next page to get started.

Planning Your Event

Picking a Time and Place

There's 3 things you'll want to figure out early on:

What will the registration cap be for each robot weight class you plan to host?
When could you host your event?
Where could you host your event?

Determining Registration Caps

For starters, think about which weight classes you would like to host. This will probably depend on your region, since certain classes are more common in certain areas.

You'll also need to determine a total attendance number, which includes competitors as well as spectators, and volunteers needed to make the event successful, and round up to the nearest multiple of 25 or 50 to be safe as far as venue occupancy limits go.

For example, we had a limit of 16 antweights, 16 beetleweights, and 24 plantweights, bringing us to a total of 56 robots. We planned for 20 - 30 volunteers, bringing us to ~80 people. Then, we round up to 100 to account for spectators, and robots with more than one person associated with it.

Picking a date and time

If you've tried to schedule a meeting or event with lots of people, you know you'll never find a perfect date where everyone who is interested can make it, so, just pick a time that works with as many people as possible.

To help focus your decision making, here are some things to consider:

When is my venue available?
- Before securing your venue, you'll want to have some 2-3 alternate dates ready in case your desired spaces are already booked.
When are other events in your region?
- Ideally, you don't want to be scheduled super close to other combat events. People need time to work on their robots between competitions. Other events will inevitably pop up as you plan your event, but try to avoid these sorts of conflicts. Searching on Robot Combat Events makes this easy to find out.
- For what it's worth, we managed to have a great turn out, even with scheduling conflicts. There was an event hosted a week before Comet Clash, only about a 20 minute drive away from our campus, and another event in the Houston area (~5 hour drive) on the same weekend.
When is your organizing team available?
- Everyone on your organizing team should be available on that date. If they aren't, plan to have other people in place who can fill in their roles and have context on things they planned in the competition in the event things go south (which they will).
Plan around school schedules if expecting a decent chunk of university competitors.
- Student attendance will likely be reduced for events on the week of or before final exams, and also during breaks, since many students aren't permanently based in the locations they study in, or plan to travel to other locations. If you're not sure what schedules looks like for local schools, consult their academic calendars.

Picking a place

Locking in a venue and gaining authorization to run your event will probably be your biggest lift as an event organizer, and will likely take a while, especially if it's your first time running a large event. This took longer and was a lot less straight forward than we'd expect, so we recommend to get this started early. From start to finish, locking in a venue probably took about a month of emails, paperwork and red tape.

We discuss our experiences securing a venue later on this page, but for now you should be aware that your venue plans may need to change, so aim to scope out 2 - 3 potential venues. Our campus' Risk and Safety department didn't approve us to use the venue we'd originally planned on using, so we had to start looking into other possible spaces.

General Venue Considerations

These are things to consider and ask venue owners when investigating venues.

How will the venue cost?
Will the venue accommodate the desired number of participants?
Is the venue available during our desired timeframe?
- Ensure that you reserve enough time for setup and teardown of your event.
- If possible, investigate whether event setup could be completed and left in place the day before your event to ease stress on the day of your event.
What's the parking situation like, and how much does it cost for you and your attendees?
- If you don't have parking close by to the venue, consider whether there is any way to make loading in robots and tools an easier experience (ex: a loading dock where people can temporarily park their vehicles to unload, before parking in a different location).
- We were able to get our campus to provide event parking permits to our participants in parking lots directly adjacent to our venue - inquire whether free/subsidized event parking permits could be made available for distribution.
Are there liability or insurance related concerns or considerations with an event like this?
- Even though numerous precautions are taken to ensure that people are safe, spectating and participating in robot combat does elevate the risk of potentially adverse events such as injury. Not only is it good to reduce your liability in the unlikely event that something does go wrong, many venues will require that some sort of waiver is completed before people can be a part of your event. Asking this question allows you to get ahead of the curve and plan to collect necessary paperwork ahead of your event, instead of being surprised later down the road.
Is soldering, battery charging, or power tool usage allowed in the venue?
- This relates to the previous question - some venues classify these as high-risk activities, and may prohibit or regulate them for the safety of participants and the space itself. Once again, it is good to gain explicit permission, instead of getting in trouble because the venue was not aware of the nature of activities taking place.
Do they allow minors in the space?
- Some spaces will require need additional paperwork to allow minors at your event / on their premises.

Physical Requirements

Pit space
- The pit space should have space for tables and chairs where people can work on their robots and store their belongings.
- There should be an adequate number of outlets available for people to charge batteries and complete other tasks - if not, you can always bring in/ask attendees to bring power strips and extension cords. Once again, you'll want to consult with your venue on this, as they may have rules on the usage of extension cords/power strips and/or an in-house solution to making power more accessible in the pits.
- How will you handle tables and chairs for pits?
  - Easy option is to get participants need to bring their own, just communicate this early
  - You can ask your venue whether they have an inventory of furniture that can be set up for your event, and what the associated costs for that service will be, if any.
Competition area
- The competition area should have be a relatively large open area where the battle boxes can be set up for matches.
- Consider how many battle box(es) will be needed to accommodate the desired number of competitors in each weight class, and still finish competing in the designated time frame. Additionally, who owns the boxes, how will they be transported to the competition space, and what fees are associated with their use?

Getting a venue for Comet Clash

While this section is specific to us at UTD, and serves as a reference for our future events, it should be beneficial to others, especially to fellow university organizers who'll likely have similar structures and regulations on their campuses.

Details

For us at UTD, we reached out to our Student Organization Center very early on. All we knew was a rough idea of when we wanted to run the event, and where we wanted to do it, but knew that we needed to find out how event liability would work, especially with non-UTD students and minors present at our event. This was helpful as they pointed us in the right direction for a lot of the questions and concerns we had.

Our next steps:

Fill out a SERA (Special Events Risk Assessment) form for the event once date, time, participant count, and location are tentatively decided.
- This gets the ball rolling on everything, and pretty much every next step you'll want to complete needs this form to be done first, including securing a venue.
- To future UTD organizers - this has to be completed by a faculty/staff member and will be rejected if submitted by a student. We have a PDF export of the form template in our SharePoint - fill this out in a Word doc and send it over to our faculty advisor to submit. An example of a completed SERA form should also be in SharePoint. An event of our size, especially with external participants, gets classified by UTD as high-risk, so submitting this also triggers an email chain with the Academic Risk & Safety department.
Going back and forth with the Academic Risk & Safety department as well as the Fire department to ensure that the intended space can safely run the event.
- They will probably reach out to you after submitting the SERA form. We reached out to them first but they told us to complete the SERA form before much could really happen.
Speaking with the Programs for Minors office to take care of waivers for attendees under 18
- Their email is pace@utdallas.edu, but they should reach out to you automatically once you indicate that there will be minors at your event on the SERA form.
- Requiring adult supervision for minors and not accepting custodial responsibility is the easiest option. For this, we were provided a waiver that a parent/guardian signed on behalf of the minor participant.
  - It is technically possible to accept custodial responsibility if you really want to (so minors could attend without a parent/guardian supervising). However, from my limited memory and understanding, there may be fees for this, need for additional insurance policies, paperwork, etc, so this seems like more hassle than it's worth.
- The Programs for Minors office provided a disclaimer that needs to be displayed on any communications about the event.
  - Their template: The University of Texas at Dallas (insert name of college/school/unit/department) will not take custodial responsibility of minors while participating in (insert name of program). Custodial responsibility will remain with teachers K-12, parents, legal guardians, and chaperones.
  - The customized disclaimer we ended up using on our publications (with approval): Comet Robotics at UT Dallas, a registered student organization at The University of Texas at Dallas, will not take custodial responsibility of minors while participating in Comet Clash 2024. Custodial responsibility will remain with teachers K-12, parents, legal guardians, and chaperones.
Getting the ECSW Atrium and Birds' Nest reserved through the Dean's office
- I went in-person to the Dean's office to begin the conversation on how to make this happen, and later got this taken care of via email/Teams correspondence with a student assistant.
- Afterwards, we got final approval for the event from the ECS Events Manager (also in the Dean's office)
  - I think we could gotten the approval and the reservation step done all-in-one if we just went straight to the ECS Events Manager but not too sure. It probably would be best to do this before trying to going through other avenues to reserve the space in the future.
- NOTE: Beginning this conversation directly with the Dean and not requesting the space through the SOC caused us issues with requesting services from the SOC - in the future, we should fill out a special room request through the SOC, BEFORE reaching out to the Dean. Since ECS has authority over that space, they will still end up being the ones to provide the final approval of the space, so you should still reach out to them. However, to request facilities and media services from the SOC, the event space MUST be reserved through the SOC.
- TL;DR: the process for reserving ECSW should be
  - complete SOC Special Room Request
  - email ECS Events Manager (find contact on UTD Directory) and Dean's office student assistant (go in person to get contact information) to put the event on their radar
  - wait for someone from SOC to reach out to ECS, wait for SOC to confirm reservation
  - profit (hopefully)
Requesting facilities and media services through the SOC
- Through the SOC Special Room Request form, we can request additional services at no additional cost to us - facilities and media are billed to the SOC, not to us as an org
- For facilities, we requested additional furniture to be brought in to the atrium and bird's nest: https://eventplanning.utdallas.edu/process/inventory/
- For media, we requested a PA system with 2 wireless microphones, and access to the video wall

Other spaces on campus we considered:

UTDesign Makerspace
- This was the original plan when we decided to run our event and would've been most convenient. Our battle boxes are already set up, there's a dedicated soldering area, and there is plenty of table space for pits. However, the academic risk and safety team didn't greenlight us to use that space for the event, so we had to make other plans.

Visitor Center Atrium
- This was the Risk and Safety team's recommendation. This space would've been ideal as everything could have been located in one large open area on one floor.
- We never got too far with this avenue as we heard back from the ECS team first. UREC's room booking system kept causing issues where they wouldn't see our reservations come through. In retrospect, this might have been an error on my part but worked out pretty well in the end. It was also unknown how much the VCA would have costed us.

Make sure to get confirmations IN WRITING for things that are crucial to the event's success and ability to run, such as venue reservations. Once you're close to locking in a time and location, it's time to start publicizing your event!

Marketing Your Event

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.

UTD-specific marketing options

Digital Signage
UTD Events Calendar (shows on the UTD website / some other areas)
Ask faculty advisor to send an ecs.all email

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!

Volunteers

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