Newly elected recruitment chair
 

Hi everyone, I was just (last night) elected to Recruitment chair and I was hoping to get any advice you guys could offer. I go to the university of british columbia in vancouver. We have 8 npc sororities on campus and total is 50. There are 2 or 3 chapters at or above total, 3 well below, and the rest are in the 40s. Quota 2 years ago was 12 and last september was 18. My chapter has not made quota the last 2 years, and are one of the smallest chapters on campus. It's one of my goals to get quota this year, and i know that it's going to be difficult. If anyone out there has any tips for a small chapter looking to increase numbers, please let me know. We have a no frills rush at ubc, so we dont really get to do much of the fun stuff that i read about on the boards. But other than that, any advice or ideas you have are much appreciated.
Thanks,
Erica

My best suggestion is get really good at COB. Smaller chapters (of which I was a part) need to work at COB because during a big event like Formal Recruitment it just helps to have a lot of people to make rotation groups work and the like. I'm not saying that it can't be doneas my chapter did achieve quota while I was a collegiate, but if you go into the fall with 5-10 more members via COB (so that means try and get them before the end of this semester) it will help. Smaller houses can sometimes lose out the most during formal recruitment because they just look small. I'm not at all trying to bring you down. I'm just speaking from my own experience.

Best wishes to you...you've got a fun job, but a tough one, even in bigger chapters(which my became at one point) recruitment is not the easiest job.

I would really emphasize what AOII_LB93 said about COB. My chapter used to only rush twice per year. Once at Formal Recruitment, and the other time during a one-week informal recruitment period. Then we got 1 girl at Formal Recruitment and freaked. We had 16 juniors out of like, 28 girls (total is 40). We needed a strong class that year and the next year to replace all of those girls that would be graduated. Not to mention we had 5 seniors that year.

We had tons of COB events, and by the end of the semester, we initiated a class of 7 (much better). The next semester, we initated a class of 8. A few of them we got through our informal recruitment week, but we also got a few of them throughout the rest of the semester. We also had 2 girls waiting until Fall to be initated. We hit total for the first time since we'd been chartered. Now that I look back, it was absolutely silly for us to not COB as hard as we did. We should always be on the look out for new members, not just 2 weeks a year.

This Formal Recruitment went awesome, and we got 15 girls to send us way over total. We can't give out bids, but we're still holding COB events once a month so that girls will want to join through Formal Recruitment next year. We had 20 girls come out to our first one! It was absolutely awesome. We are very healthy numbers-wise now.

astroAPhi,

I love hearing about COR/COB. Tell us about the events your chapter had success with! What did you find worked well? What didn't? What tended to attract the most women? And how did you keep your chapter motivated to keep recruiting?

Thanks for the replies so far, i really appreciate the help. We actually have been getting most of our girls through COB the last few years (i was one) we're pretty good at it. It just seems to me that-at least on this campus, you have to do well in FR to grow. So if anyone has advice as to how their small chapters did well in FR they would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Erica

I think that one of the most important things to do is to be yourself! When I went through formal, all the other chapters were fake and sugary sweet, but AOII was down to earth and I liked that they were themselves. They told it how it was and I appreciated that.

crazy -

the focus for convention this year is recruitment - you'll have lots of ideas after you leave this year!

;) in the meantime use your MRA and other advisors!!

see ya in san antonio!!