Career fairs are a great place to meet a lot of potential sponsors, especially because many of the people you will pitch to will be Purdue engineering alumni.
The Industrial Roundtable is a 3-day career fair that takes place in September with hundreds of engineering companies with booths at Memorial Mall. It’s the most important career fair to attend.
https://www.purdueesc.org/employers/industrial-roundtable-information
The plan at a career fair is to walk from booth to booth looking for companies that are likely to sponsor and then pitch to them. Should be done in small groups of up to 3 people. At a large career fair like IR, it’s best to have several groups pitching at various times over the fair. It helps to bring some technical members along in each group to answer specialized questions.
Survey the companies that will be at the fair ahead of time, and choose the ones you want to visit.
Create a spreadsheet to keep track of which have been visited and the information you get from each.
Bring a brochure of some kind to give to companies that has a description of your sponsorship package
Example (2022-23): https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/13QrLnhHiCqR5WaVHZ3uTYOjcN0R3VM0m
You can do some research on the top target companies to have some substance to talk about during the pitch.
The goal of pitching is to get a company contact that you can follow up with for sponsorship. Usually it’s an email or phone number, often on a business card. Keep track of these in your spreadsheet.
Most people at the booths at career fairs will be HR people, but it’s common to see engineers as well. Try to talk to whoever will be most excited about robotics. Even better if they’re Purdue alumni.
Start with a greeting:
“Hi, we are from Purdue RoboMasters, one of the student robotics teams on campus. Are you guys open to sponsoring student organizations?”
If yes, give a short description of the club. Cover three points: