For informal with a small quota, seeing this recruitment as sort of a prep for fall with the new girls makes sense.

On the other hand, if I were in charge of selecting for a chapter who would attract for my group this spring, I'd go with the folks who I thought had the strongest interpersonal skills and represented the chapter in a outstanding way. These folks might not be absolutely new to recruitment.

I think most chapters are going to do very well no matter how they decide to select participants and going with one fall pledge class avoids any hurt feelings.

There are pluses an minuses to any method of selecting them.

I tend to think that bringing in members from other chapters actually hurts a chapter. The women may be passionate about XYZ, but they can't speak to the experience of being a member of THAT chapter, which is alot of what the PNMs will be asking about. The women from other schools can't talk about how fun the mixer with ___ fraternity was, or why they do _____ for the local philanthropy event. That leads PNMs to wonder "Why are some of the girls at XYZ from different schools, and the girls at AAA, BBB, etc. all from the same school?"

Agreed. I've never know bringing in other chapter's members to work. (But of course, my experience is limited.)

This may seem like a silly thing to point out, but I don't think most chapters who previously had spring recruitment were doing COB/COR events with the whole chapter rushing anyway. So, I'm guessing that with the relatively small size of anticipated quota (around 200/17?), it's just not a big risk. I suspect what we're talking about is letting slightly more than 25% of a chapter pick new members who will total less than 10% of the chapter, maybe much less than 10% at some chapters.

I think I've heard of a few cases where girls were brought in to sing or stand around to make the group look bigger in the whole chapter setting, but didn't actually do any one on one rushing.

That seems like it might help if you had enough actual chapter members to still rush girls. When you've got 70 or so PNMs per party, as I think you would at UGA for first round (1200/17), I think all the chapter have 70+ members. So if you brought in some members from other chapters to seem as big and the party as full as others would be, maybe?

I honestly don't know what they do these days in terms of door chants or whatever, but I can remember all of us assembling in the foyer. If we only had 100 girls and other groups had 150+, the first impression was still different even if PNMs liked the members they met. With girls from other campuses to swell that first assembly, you could avoid that and still only really have PNMs meet your chapter. It's still a little bait and switch and for that reason undesirable, but when you're dealing with first impressions carrying a lot of weight, I'm not going to judge.

The chapter I advise is at a small D2 state school so I assume that UGA would be even more competitive and have a larger spring recruitment. Another concern of mine about limiting the number of actives during recruitment is this:
We have to release significant PNMs after the first day thanks to the RFM. I understand that there is a certain level of trust that sisters have when making decisions to release PNMs (many decisions can be made based on black and white issues such as year in school, grades, etc.) but having only a small fraction of the chapter meet women on one day seems like it would be unfair to both the PNM and the chapter as there would be so few people who got to meet the PNM before a decision had to be made. At least by having more actives in the room, they can gauge body language or recognize a face as "that girl that sat behind me in church" and potentially give the PNM a better shot at finding a home because she had more exposure (albeit silent) to the entire chapter and not just a small cross section of those selected to recruit.

SRSLY??? That's weird. To me, anyway. If a chapter is struggling for numbers, I would think they need to put every girl they can get in a COB event - it ups the chance that one of them will connect with a rushee.

Of course, the whole reasoning behind recs and getting the pnms information before recruitment is to find the girls actives already know - "that girl that sat behind me in church". And if actives are in the room, odds are they are busy with their pnms, and not taking notes on girls they can see but not even necessarily identify. As it stands now, most recruitments require the entire chapter to vote on a pnm based on the input of the very limited number of actives who had a chance to talk to her. PNMs, too, have to make a choice based on their limited interaction with a few members. That's the reality, whether the whole chapter is actively rushing or not.

Well, it's the nature of informal recruitment events and the size of the chapters. Even the smallest chapter at UGA has more than 100 members, I think. If you only expected 20 or so PNMs, wouldn't 100 rushers be kind of awkward if you were doing pretty much anything other than hosting a party at your house? I think most of the spring classes last year for the groups who took them were in the 5 to 15 range, but I have really no idea how many girls participated at events. If they had parties at the houses for the first event, maybe they did have the whole chapter participate. You also have to remember that spring rush was sort of intentionally low key for a lot of groups and they were mainly rushing girls they already knew, I think.

Struggling for numbers here is just kind of relative, I guess.
Sure, if you had a chapter of 30, you'd need them all.

If we're talking about the idea of limiting rushers for formal just as a theoretical strategy:

we should keep in mind that with more than 1000 PNMs at UGA for formal and the nature/quality of the photos girls send in, I'm not sure the chapter really does always completely recognize everyone they know in real life until the actual parties. And unless you're talking about limiting the number of rushers to under what it would take to single rush, there are girls who wouldn't be busy with PNMs who can float and met girls, but there'd be triple this number if you didn't limited rushers.

I understand your point about the issues of MS at large recruitments, but I'm not sure that limiting rushers wouldn't make the problem even worse.

For informal, I don't think it's a big deal and with the relatively small size of the PNM pool might actually keep it from being awkward and overwhelming for the PNMS. I suspect they will still have actual conversations with the same number of members they would have in formal.

I don't think it would be needed, or work, at every campus. I do think there are situations where it would, and one thing I like about NPC offering different kinds of recruitment is the idea that different campuses needed different approaches. I just think limiting rushers would be one possible approach to help some chapters at some campuses.

This I can agree with. I recognize that this is a UGA thread but my concerns are obviously for my D2 campus. Rush is not competitive and recs are very few and far between when recruiting girls at my campus so there is no way for most of the chapter to know who is coming that door until they hear a name or see a face. Until the first party, there is very little intorduction of a PNM to chapters on my campus. I'm not totally opposed to NPC offering different kinds of recruitment ideas to solve problems on different campuses but just don't see how limiting the number of active members would assist on my particular campus where the recruitment environment is smaller (300-350 PNMs during formal) and very non-competitive. Instead, in my situation, I think that it would benefit both the chapter and the PNM to meet each other as much as possible.

thanks ksuviolet06...you rock!