Pledge Trainer?
 

Or Educator/Parent/etc? Ok, Here's the deal, my chapter voted last night to cut out the position of Pledge Trainer out of the bylaws and not have it as a position next semester. This disturbes me. Has there been a chapter that could cope with a MVP doing everything?

Depends on a couple of things...

First, size of the chapter. Mem VP can pretty easily handle things in chapters of 10-12 and pledge classes of 4. Also, some chapters have a fellowship VP that handles fellowship events that are handled by the Membership VP at some chapters.

Randy

I'll second that. My chapter, Tau Lambda, was, while I was there, between ~10-20 actives strong. By our by-laws, the VPM was the pledge "educator" (which, I think, is the term the national frat. wants to use?) for the first pledging term. (We ran a spring and fall rush); however, after that, s/he was allowed to appoint an Educator.
So, VPM was expected to be the Educator at least once, although we recognized that s/he might choose to not do it again.
In practice, I can't remember a time when the VPM *wasn't* the Pledge Educator.

nLFnS

Re: Pledge Trainer?
 

There's nothing wrong with the term Pledgemaster. I've seen nothing from National stating a preference for one term over another (and I wrote the Pledgemaster Leadership Series volume).

Personally I think its a bad idea to have the MVP be the pledgemaster. The duties of MVP go way beyong pledgemaster, and since the duties of pm are very time consuming (I've been one), having the MVP be the PM too means other aspects of the chapter's membership program will suffer. Especially if you don't have a Fellowship Chair (or equiv). Remember, the chapter's member program is about creating a program that keeps the members active with fellowship events and 'training'.

I guess "educator" is just something I've seen a lot more use of lately, and I figured the trend was somehow official. Dunno. Alternately, I've gone insane \(@_@)/

And, I would agree with emb021 entirely, in that if your chapter has no VP Fellowship type position, as ours did/does, it would be rough. In our case VPM was almost a Rush Chair and then Pledge Educator, and then, back to Rush Chair, etc. Retention was certainly part of the job, but "fellowship" had an officer taking care of it at all times.

This is, of course, for better or worse. Looking back it, I'd have liked, more than a seperate pledge educator, to have a Rush Coordinator seperate from VPM. That was a job our chapter needed much more. I think we were at 12 actives this fall, though, and we've just pledged 9, and will activate 8 on thursday. Contact Tau Lambda (Terre Haute, IN apo.rose-hulman.edu ) if you'd like to stop by :D for activation, or anytime!

In an ideal situation, you would want to have the MVP, Pledge Trainer, Rush person, and fellowship person (whatever you might call those positions) be separate people. If a chapter is short on man power, the same person may have to do all of them, but I think its a bad idea to eliminate any of these positions from your bylaws. Otherwise, as you grow/shrink, you're forced to change your bylaws all the time.

One solution that I have seen to that is that to have the positions in the bylaws with a caveat that allows them to be filled by the person above them in the org-chart if necessary. The determining factor in whether a position actually exists in a given semester may be determined by the number of active brothers or it may be a vote before the election of a position as to whether the position should exist that semester.

Randy