Any Philanthropy advice?
 

As you may have seen from the "2003 ADPi Officers" thread, I am the new Philanthropy chair for my chapter. This will be my position for my senior year. :)

In recent years, our chapter's participation in philanthropy events has been sort of low, and I am anxious to change that. I have told my sisters that my logo for 2003 will be "Kicking philanthropy's @ss back into shape."
The only thing is, that because it has been so low, I don't have many positives examples to go by. Does anyone have any suggestions on philanthropy events?

I have heard from our previous philanthropy chair, that our local Ron's House isn't too warm to welcome our volunteer work. The reason why, supposidly, is because we don't officer as much financial help as other organizations do, such as GM, Ford, or Chrysler (I'm in the Motor City here). Of course our chapter can't compete financially with the Big 3, so again, I am lost as to what we can do. As I said, I will be in my senior year, and I have NEVER even been to our Ron's House.

If anyone can offer me any ideas, it will be a HUGE help! I don't want to disappoint my sisters, but at the moment, I have no idea what to do!

adpiviolets,

once again congrats on getting philanthropy thats such a fun office. for our chapter we usually try to go to the RMH once a semester. around halloween we always do trick or treat for canned goods around local neighborhoods....we distribute flyers about a week in advance explaining what we are doing and then go back and pick up the canned goods....we take these to the RMH when we go. also we collect pop tabs year round to take them down there. and when we go to the RMH we volunteer our help which ever way it might be whether its cooking, cleaning, etc. they usually really appreciate this. something fun this year that we are going to do for philanthropy is have a flag football game with the fraternities. at this moment i can't really think of the rest of the stuff at this moment. hopefully our new philanthropy chair this upcoming year will have a lot of fun ideas. i hope this helped a little.

The way we raise the majority of our philanthropy money is that we have a really big soccer tournament in the spring for all the fraternities on our campus. Each frat is charged an entrance fee of around $200 I think. May be more, may be less. Then we rent two soccer fields for the day and have a soccer tournament where every frat plays the first round and then only the winners go on to round two and only the winners of that go onto round three. We also provide incentives for the frats to participate such as providing whoever they say are their team captains with t-shirts that say Row Cup and giving everyone from the winning frat a t-shirt and trophy. We also rent a location out and have a big post party that night. All in all, it raises about 2500 bucks for RMH.
In the fall, we have two events, the first is a fall carnival which we set up in our lawn where we have refreshments and booths like face painting, sand dig, cake walks, stuff like that where we invite the RMH kids to come to. This year around 30 kids came.
Also, we have a Holiday Toy Drive. We open it up to the entire school to donate toys and then we pair up witha frat and have a "toy wrapping party." We keep half the toys and donate them to RMH and then the frat keeps half the toys to donate to their philanthropy.
The toy drive is probably the easiest to get together, but I hope the other ideas help too!

Just one quick addition:
I don't know what other sororities are at your school, but if there are some sororities at my school that don't have chapter's at yours, i could tell you how what they do for their philanthropies and maybe their ideas could work for your chapter too. Let me know!

hey!!!

we have a flag football tournament too... but why limit it to just fraternities? every frat except one and every sorority participated, we just had a guys division and a girls division... it was really successful, and on top of an entry fee, teams had to bring tops of cans... it was alot of fun!

other ideas for rmh

halloween
rmh dinners
rmh holiday decorating
pool tournament

our chapter is also buying a room in the rmh house... it was like 25,000, but we talked it out w/the house (nicely lol) and theyre letting us pay in time! we were going to rely just on flagging down the fun and other fundraisers... but we talked about it at family weekend (always a good idea!) and donations started coming in... we'll have the room in the spring!

as for other philanthropies.... please remember the small fraternities and sororities, esp if they participate in yours. give em some love, and they'll always remember to help you out as well!

At my school, there are Gamma Phi Beta, Phi Sigma Sigma, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and Alpha Sigma Tau


Thank you, everyone, for your suggestions, this has been a HUGE help!

Good, good, good!
The only other chapter we share is Gamma Phi Beta. Here is what some of the other houses do:
Delta Gamma's philanthropy is Service for Sight and I know of two of their events: first, they go to every sorority and frat house on campus and get them to vote on someone in their house whohas the best eyes and then they take a picture of that person's eyes. Then, they put all the eyes on a board and on jars and have people put money in the jars of whoever they think has the prettiest eyes. They use this money to cover costs for their bigger event called Anchor Splash, which is a big water-style competition. At anchor splash, each frat (all the sororities only invite frats to their events because we have so many frats, but at smaller schools, I'm sure you could invite sororities and frats) pays an entrance fee and then they compete in events for points such as water polo, belly flop contest, synchronized swimming, find the most things at the bottom of the pool, normal swimming races, best looking i n a swimsuit, holding your breath contests, stuff like that. They are just silly contests, and then first, second, and third of each event gets points and then whoever has the most points at the end of the day win a trophy. The key to almost all of the philanthropy events at SC is we don't hold them on sorority property and then we let the guys BYOB and also, the winning frat and team captains of all frats get free t-shirts.

Tri-Delta has an elimination style billiards tournament. I don't know many details on that, I believe their philanthropy is Children's Cancer Research.

Kappa Kappa Gamma has a big event called KKGreens where they close down the row and rent putt putt golf courses, clubs, and balls. They have eighteen different holes and so 18 different guys from each frat can putt on one. They also are allowed to win extra points(or in the case of golf, negative points, I guess) if the guys dress up in cheesy golf style and they have a contest to see who can bounce the golf ball like Tiger Woods the longest and who can hit the ball the furthest. (But if you do that last one, be prepared to pay for someone's broken window)

Alpha Chi Omega lets all the guys on the row audition to be in a "Men of SC" calendar. They pick the hottest guys on the row and then they put a professional calendar together and sell it to the whole school.

Kappa Alpha Theta does some sort of foosball tournament.

I am not too sure about the others. Some of the frat philanthropy events are convertable too:

PIKE did a firemen/PIKE auction where they auctioned both firemen and the guys off and then the winner and whoever she bought went on this mass preplanned date that was apparently much like an invite.

AEPi does a Chili Cook-Off the day before homecoming.

Theta Xi has a casino night with an entrance fee for each person. There is a raffle, but other than that, you play with fake money and don't win anything.

Pi Kapp has a thing called Sandblast where they get this huge sandpit and they have competitions like tug of war, sandcastle building, obstacle course, burry your team captains, etc.

Lambda Chi has a thing called Watermelon bust where they do a bunch of events involving watermelons, throwing them, eating them, spitting the seeds. Of course, their watermelon also has a lot of alcohol in it, which makes these events much more fun.

Sigma Nu sells Christmas trees.

The other guy events are completely reliant on alcohol, and as such wouldn't really work for a ADPi event.

Hope you find something that really works well for your chapter!