COBs How to get girls
 

How do ya'll go about getting girls to come to ya'lls cobs? I mean we have all talked to girls in our classes but our school is big time commuter. What are some strategies ya'll have used? We have handed out flyers, posted posters etc etc. Any input would be appreciated.

What type of events do you do for COB? If your schools a big commuter school and you typically do events at night (and you have a facility) maybe you could invite women to do things during the day, ie. lunch at your facility, or take them out to lunch.

Remember that COB doesn't always have to be a big event. If a girl can't come to scheduled COB event but still is interested, have her come to the house for dinner, or get a group together to eat lunch with her in the cafeteria. Take her along to a Greek event, or anything that a group of sisters were planning to go to (except perhaps not to the bar ;))
For targeting girls that are probably already interested, check with your Panhellenic. Do they keep records of girls who rushed and dropped out? Or lists of girls interested in COB? That gives you a pool of girls who are already at least somewhat interested in joining a sorority. Call them up, invite them to things, make a flyer especially for them and mail it to all of them, etc.
Good luck!

At our last COB each member was required to bring one person. I don't know what happened if you didn't, but we got 7 out of that and then we are possibly extending 3 more bids so we are like 1 away from our goal. :) You may try that. Good luck!

A great thing I find is to give out invitations. It makes the women feel special and feel there is a reason to go. I know there are even websites online that you can do it with so you don't have to deliver them if it is a commuter campus... The idea just makes the women feel like they stand out in a crowd, but you can actually send them to the masses of the school.

Have a sister - best if someone she knows or has contact with - meet the PNM on or near campus to escort her to lunch or the event. This way she doesn't feel awkward approaching a group where she might not know that many - or any - of the women.

Perhaps you can offer to pick up/take home these women who truly are interested. i.e. Set up car pool with sisters doing the driving.

the biggest problem we are having is actually findign intrested girls.

finding interested commuters
 

Are any of your sisters commuters?

When a friend of mine ran for student government president we put flyers on every car in the commuter parking lots that said to vote for dirk, because he's a commuter too! It gives you something in common to begin with, and you can build from there.

Commuter students can have restraints that differ from resident students, such as times they can be on campus, but with planning, you can make it work.

Good luck!

deb

Remember that recruitment is a 365-day a year process! This doesn't mean that you need to have constant COR events (continuous open recruitment), but you should constantly be promoting your sorority! This will increase your chapter's visibility on campus, and your image, and make people want to get to know you. This also means putting your sisters into situations where they meet other students on campus.

Ways to increase visibility on campus:
1) Make a committment with the chapter that EVERY member will become involved with at least 1-2 clubs/organizations outside of Greek Life. This will give you a chance to interact with non-members and interest them in the sorority.

2) Have Special Letter Days. Once a week, make a committment that the entire chapter will wear letters to school. This promotes your sorority's name and establishes your presence.

3) Have mixers with non-Greeks. Are there service clubs on campus? Arrange to have a service project together! What about inviting the members of an honor society to your chapter for an ice cream social? How about a women's athletic team?

4) Get involved with campus activities. Is the school giving a lecture? Having a pep rally? Midnight basketball? Get your sisters to go-- wearing letters!

5) Get the school paper to write an article about your sorority when you do something noteworthy-- like raise a lot of money for your philanthropy, a member has done something extraordinary, etc. Make sure the article mentions a contact for more information about joining the sorority.

6) When you are holding an event, place fliers all over campus and in the mailboxes of the residence halls and off-campus groups. Chalk up the sidewalks and make banners, too. Set up a booth by the student union. Have members wear buttons their backpacks like "Ask me about XYZ sorority." You can also make banners for sporting events like "XYZ loves SCHOOL" and hanging them at the stadium!

7) Get a list of non-affiliated women from your Panhellenic office. These could be women who dropped out of recruitment, etc.

8) Talk to your Panhellenic Council about having Panhellenic representatives go to Freshman Orientations and Transfer Orientations to promote Greek Life. Get access to the addresses of these new students and send them a postcard or an email inviting them to check you out and come to an event.

9) Set up a chapter website. Make a t-shirt or banner that promotes it.

10) Get the fraternities to support your events by having them make banners and hang them outside their houses. Give a prize to the fraternity with the best banner. "IE: Good luck ABC Sorority with Recruitment. Love the brothers of XYZ."

11) Sometimes the most successful events aren't high-end, super-planned recruitment parties. Often the successes are low-key, come to this campus event with us style events. They're low pressure on the PNM and the sisters, and the sisters can expect to have fun, too.

12) You can get great ideas by visiting your sororoity's inter/national web site and talking to other members of your sorority, too! Also, you can attend your sorority's yearly volunteer leadership trainings. Or bring your alumnae back for a night of sisterhood fun and brainstorming! They're sure to have great ideas, too!

Good luck!

I agree with everyone who says to keep things low-key and not look at COB as events, but as a part of lifestyle. Incorporate girls you want as members into things you are doing anyway, like going to speakers or other campus events. If you are having tons and tons of planned parties and not a lot of return, it's like having formal rush all the time and it can be a real drain on chapter morale (not to mention chapter funds).

Also, since you're in Nawlins, I know what school you go to (and some of the people), so you might want to put off sort of a "funky fresh" vibe. The students I know from your school are like that.

Have fine guys pass out the brochures :D

Fill me in.

The way I see it rush starts early in the semester. Rush lasts a few weeks and at the end of rush there is bid matching. The largest sororities usually make quota and total. The small sororities that are under total or quota that still want more members start to COB. The problem is that most of the girls that want to pledge already did and it is slim pickens when COB starts.

If COB is continuous up until the sorority reaches total then why do the sororities wait until after the standard rush period to start COB?

Couldn't they basically start COB before the standard rush period? That way they could beat the larger houses to the punch. The larger sororities won't be able to rush because they were already at total from the previous semester.

I think what adpiucf meant, is that part of recruitment is having good PR, which helps make it a more desireable chapter to join when rush comes around. By increasing visibility on campus and such, people will have heard of the chapter, either good things or bad things, and during rush they will remember that. Particularly if there are many upperclassmen rushing: they will already know the reputations of the different groups and probably share them with their fellow rushees.

As for the other things you mentioned about starting COB earlier than formal rush, it looks to me like rush starts pretty early in the school year at azdtaxi's university, perhaps even before classes start? They can't really start rush before that!

With my investigation in finding this out, I checked out your webpage. A webpage can be a great PR tool for PNMs! I especially liked the quotes at the top of each page, they're cute! You should probably submit the page to nationals to be linked off of the national page, though! If you need to know how to do that, PM me!

This varies from school to school.

At Valparaiso, formal recruitment isn't until January, and they can't recruit freshmen until them, but the sororities will usually have the second or third week in September as a mass COB event-- every sorority has a week full of parties and hang-outs and events in order to replace their graduated seniors. But it's easy to target upperclasswomen before recruitment begins in January.

At other schools, formal recruitment starts in mid-August, before classes start and before there is any chance to meet any women! So you can't COB until after formal recruitment anyway.

Even with upperclasswomen, sometimes they'd prefer to go through formal recruitment to get a shot at becoming an ABC, if ABC always makes quota and doesn't have to COB. Only if they don't match ABC will they consider other sororities. This can happen whether or not they went through recruitment as freshmen.

Oh, and we can't do COB during formal recruitment.

At a lot of larger schools rush starts before classes even begin and the freshman girls are given bids before they have even attended class.

However, if (a)rush doesn't start till mid September or so or (b)freshmen can't pledge until January, the sororities should definitely be targeting sophs and above.

azdtaxi,

I go to the same school as you do. (UNO, right?!) I notice that AXD isn't that visible on campus. When I asked around about the different sororities, most didn't know anything about you guys. I saw only one poster for COB and that wasn't in a high traffic area at all.

azdtaxi,

This is a great chance to bring this up with your chapter-- that students haven't seen you enough on campus. Get your name out there! Wear letters as much as possible! And to get the fraternities all abuzz-- serenade them! Guys love that!

Good luck and remember-- publicity!

I agree with adpiucf.

Publicity is the key!!

What kinds of things are you doing to make yourselves visible? Here are some more suggestions in addition to the ones already mentioned (I don't know if you do any of these already or not). Forgive me if I'm redundant:

chapter chow - everyone meets at 5:00 on Wednesdays (or whatever day letter day is, so everyone should already be in letters) in the main cafeteria and eats dinner together

dress up day - (Thursdays for us) everyone dresses up and wears their Quill to classes all day

intramurals - do ya'll have intramurals shirts or jerseys that are the same? If you had everyone wearing the same thing it would make your presence known a little better

have a blood drive - team up with another org and have the bloodmobile come to campus. Make LOTS of fliers! This is great because 1-it promotes the Panhellenic spirit, 2-lots of great PR, and 3- you get philanthropy hours and it's for a good cause.

sporting events - does your school have a football team? A basketball team? A baseball team? If you do, make sure everyone attends the games (together) in letters. Arrive and leave as a group. Make banners and place them around campus saying "Alpha Xi backs the (mascot)." Bring posters with you to the games.

realize your potential - the new program is a GREAT opportunity to make yourself visible. Speak with your Programs VP and ask her to do the male/female communications program and team up with a fraternity to do it. Or you can pick another one and team up with a sorority. These programs don't give away any of our secrets and can be adapted for use with non-Alpha Xi's. Also, don't forget about the Askey Grants that are available. You could ask for a grant to bring a speaker to campus to do a program on alcohol awareness or hazing and invite all Greeks and non-Greeks to attend.

letter bags - okay, I know you know what I'm talking about. The white canvas bags with the stitched letters on them? Make everyone in your chapter (okay, you really can't MAKE them, but it's worth a shot) get one and carry their books to class in them. These are really effective.

pajama party/ice cream social - have a pajama party/ice cream social where all the sororities on campus get together and invite non-Greek women to come for a good time (as well as panhellenic info!).

spaghetti dinner - similar to the above suggestion. Have one sorority in charge of the appetizer, one in charge of the entree, one in charge of the desert, etc. Have non-Greek women attend and be "served" by the sorority women.

ETA: I thought of a few more!

newspaper - does your school have a newspaper? Take out an advertisement when you have these blood drives or programs or whatever. Put in an ad after every rush or COB congratulating your new members, then list their names. Also put ads in congratulating the intramurals winners, greek week winners, etc.

radio station - can you get a 10-second spot on your campus radio station? Something like "The XZ chapter of Alpha Xi Delta wants students to back the (mascot). Come to the game Thursday night at 7 pm and be prepared to cheer your team on to victory."

Adopt-a-Highway - self-explanatory. It gets your name on a sign. Just make sure you keep your section of the road clean please. :D

camp-a-thon/rock-a-thon/swing-a-thon - these are fundraisers that you can do and it gets your name out there. Double bonus.

Keep in mind that COBs and rush are just 2 times in the year when you have formal recruitment so to speak - you are recruiting 365 days a year!!! The more you do for your campus, the more your campus will give back to you.

GREAT IDEAS!!!!

Thought of another one -

you said your campus is a commuter campus? Do you have a lot of "older" less-traditional students? What I'm trying to suggest is a "Mother's Day Out" where on like a Saturday (or even a weekday evening) your chapter offers free babysitting services for mothers to be able to go out and have fun or run errands or just not have the kids for a day!

Another thing you can do is to take out cute little classified ads. Like, "AXiD wishes everyone good luck on their midterms!" or "Go AXiD! Greek Week 2004!" Then also encourage individual sisters to take out little ads, too, like "Good luck to my AXiD big sis Ashley on her Stats test" or "Welcome to AXiD, Kristin! From your big sis Amanda", etc. At my school we have a section of the classifieds called "Shout Outs" that is either free or very cheap to put something in.

The benefit of these ads are that you can run one or more every week for relatively cheap, so you're always in the paper!

I think a great idea is chalking high trafic areas for birthdays, finals and midterms. it's cheaper than flyers, and stays until it rains!!!

-Michelle