Continous Open Bidding
 

I was just curious as to how the Continuous Open Bidding process works. How long is this bidding period normally open for at colleges, the entire semester, or just a few weeks after regular recruitment? Also, how does the pledge education timeframe/period work for girls who receive bids during COB? What do sororities do in terms of things like pledge retreats and Initiation for girls who received bids in COB?

COB is usually open all semester or until the chapter either a) makes the quota set from Formal Recruitment or b) makes campus total.

COB new members usually attend the same meetings and things as the other new members, unless they join several weeks into the process. They usually attend the same events and their initiation may or may not be held at the same time as others. It depends on when they joined the chapter and that group's policies.

So then if they join, say, halfway into our pledge education period, should we start them from the beginning of pledge ed and just hold individual pledge ed seminars/events/etc. or should we wait until the following semester? Our local sorority has been looking into the possibility of using COB inbetween our formal recruitments but we're just not sure as to the best way to work the pledge education system in with this, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

I apologize if you already do this, but if you don't already have an outlined plan for new member ed and initation, with set dates from bid day to initation, DO IT. It will help you in integrating your new member classes.

Let's say that the time you take to initate your new member period is not to exceed 6 weeks from Bid Day and no less than 4 weeks from Bid Day. Meaning you can initiate them at Week 4, 5, or 6 of their pledgeship.

Using this model, you can set up three groups of new members, Track A, Track B and Track C. The three groups will all be called your new member class and can have activities together.

Week 1: Formal Recruitment's Bid Day, Track A has Lesson 1
Week 2: Track A has Lesson 2, CR events
Week 3: Bid Day for CR Events, New Member Retreat (Track B has Lesson 1 & 2 Cram Session) and both tracks have Lesson 3 together at retreat. They're now all caught up.
Week 4: Lesson 4 for A&B
Week 5: Lesson 5 for A&B, CR, Bid Day for Track C and Lesson 1 for them. They'll still get to be with the earlier tracks.
Week 6: Initation for Track A (6 weeks) and Track B (4 weeks), Lesson 2 for Track C
Week 7: Lesson 3
Week 8: Lesson 4
Week 9: Lesson 5
Week 10: Initation for Track C (6 weeks; hold a retreat somewhere in their 6 weeks; you can even do CR and have a Track D start new member ed in this time span.)

Hope that made sense!!! Basically, you can integrate your new member classes and play catch up to a certain point depending on when they pledged or hold them for the next set of initations.

It's up to you how you want to structure things. As a local, you have lots of flexibility.

One of the points of a pledge / new member program is to give your new members a "trial" period during which they can learn about the sorority and get to know the sisters and their pledge sisters well enough to decide if they want to go through with initiation. A risk of having a NM join an existing class halfway through the NM period, is that that NM's education will be rushed and she will not have as much time to experience that "trial" period, bond with her pledge sisters, and make a fully informed decision.

On the other hand, if a NM joins a week or two into the pledge period and is dedicated enough to "catch up" to the existing NM class in her education, it might be best for her to join the existing class rather than become a pledge class of one. It's less stressful on your new member educator and on the sorority as a whole (i.e. having to hold two separate initiations).

My chapter has done both. We've integrated a new NM into an existing class that was one week into their NM period, and we've had overlapping NM periods and two initiations in the same semester. In both cases, it worked well.