Alumnae Association Recruitment Ideas
 

We just started an alumnae association here in South Central Wisconsin, and we are looking to host a recruitment events to get more area alum. involved.

Does anyone have any experience with alumnae assoc. recruitment? What ideas can you share? Did you send invitations? How did you appeal to alumnae sisters?

We are planning a pot-luck barbecue the third weekend in September.

Some of our most successful moves have been:

1) Get a list of alumnae within a set radius from your headquarters and mail/email a newsletter to them all with info about the event as well as what the chapter has been up to

2) When you get that list, look it carefully and jot a short but personal note to the members you (and the others who are organizing this) know personally.

3) Offer to car pool or give somebody a ride if they are near you. Even though they are your sisters, if they don't personally know anybody involved in this event, they may feel intimidated about walking into an event alone because they think that everybody will already know each other.

We are in the process of an alumnae chapter start-up in our area too. Here are the steps we have taken and seen success with.

1. Get list of all local alums in your local area, we had over 500 alums in our area and another alumnae group that is already active. We focused on alums initiated after 1980 to break it down.

2. Email everyone on the list and ask them to join you in starting up the new group.

3. Take those that responded and form your core group of women willing to help start up the new group.

4. Divide the list among your core group and handwrite invites to your first event. We did dinner and a short get to know you at a local restaraunt in their private room. I think the handwritten invites were very personal.

5. Plan, plan, plan your first event and have all the info about the group at that time. After our first meeting we had 28 dues paying members.

6. Come up with interesting monthly activities, so far we had dinner out, a Movie Night with pizza, popcorn and lots of mingling, and a Wine & Cheese Tasting. We have had a great turnout to everything.

7. Get involved with a local chapter. I have communicated everything with our local collegiate chapter and their Advisor. We sent flowers for Rush and made "Recruitment Survival Bags" with snacks and things for the actives. The more alumnae presence, the more alums you can recruit as the actives graduate. Next month we are having a big Homecoming weekend celebration with the alums and the actives together.

8. Have a website, we have already recruited 2-3 women from having a website. Ours is set up through yahoo and costs around $9 per month. Check it out at www.pinkladiesofdeltazeta.com

9. Look everywhere for potential alumnae members, I send out emails, we have the website, a group on Facebook, and I contact alums on Myspace. It takes lots of work but the more you work at recruiting alums the stronger your group will be!

10. Keep at it! We started our very first brainstorm meeting about our group in March, 5 months later we have officers, and 33 dues paying members! Our goal is to have 50 members by March when we apply for official recognition as an alumnae chapter! Best of Luck, you can do it!

One thing we did this year was a very successful Open House. Here's what we did:

- Got our annual listing from our EO and sent out printed invitations with rsvp cards and envelopes to everyone on our mailables list (receieved from nationals). To keep cost down I made 4 invitations to a page of 8.5 x 11 paper, and 8 RSVP cards to a page, color copied them, and then used a paper cutter to slice them.....it was time consuming but far cheaper than actually buying and printing invitations.

- Called around to SEVERAL restaurants in fun but easy to get to locations (we are an area that covers both a major city as well as multiple suburban areas) and found a trendy one that was willing to book our group with NO minimum F&B expenditures or booking fees.

- Contacted our EO and our philantrhopic arm, the Alpha Phi Foundation, and explained what we were doing. They were, in short, "phi-nomenal" and sent me a TON of freebie giveaways like car decals, philanthropy information, notecards, etc.

- Created gift bags with the EO/Foundation "goodies" as well as our calendar of events, an interest form, an EO "international dues" form, and an icebreaker game that we played. Each give bag had a nametag clipped to it with a woman's name, chapter, school, and a star or two signifiying a certain fact (gold stars for dues payers, green stars for new graduates, blue for executive board members, etc.)

- Went to a nearby greek store and bought a LOT of cheapie gifts as giveaways

At the actual event, where we normally have 5 girls show up we had well over 30!!! Women recieved prizes for being the first to RSVP, the first to RSVP and pay chapter dues, the first to bring other Phis along with them to the event (one girl brought 8) and basically everyone came away with some sort of token. We reviewed the overall calendar, got emails for people who were interested in helping with specific areas of chapter programming (membership, collegiate support, etc) and spent a good 1.5 of the 2 hours just mixing and mingling. The event was so well recieved that we are doing another one in the late spring to welcome new graduates.

The only helpful hint that I should have done that I would pass along to you - make EVERYONE sign-in with their name and email...I didn't have everyone's contact information afterwards so I had to go through other members to find it, which was way more taxing than needed.

Hope this helps and best of luck to you!!!

These are some really great ideas!


jesidz - did you get to 50 women yet?