Advertising Formal Recruitment
 

This may sound like an odd question to most of you. But I go to school in Canada, and our greek system is small, last year quota from formal recruitment was only eight. All of the sororities always want quota to be around 30, but we have had trouble getting girls to come out to formal. Our school does not recognize any of the greek organizations so it makes everything harder. Any suggestions? If any of you did not think about joining a sorority before you went to college what changed your mind, or what caught your attention?

Most girls don't even know the greek scene exists.

Thanks
Canadian Alpha Gam

My school also has a small Greek system, so we advertised for formal (Panhellenic) and informal (just us). We advertised on Facebook and by the bookstore. That's the main place that any organization/event/cause hands out fliers on our campus.

What's campus housing like? Do you guys have all-female dorms?

A great way to promote your sororities is to help out with dorm move-in days (with permission from the powers that be, of course). Wear your letters proudly while you help these girls get acquainted with their new campus home. They get introduced to Greek Life ASAP. Hopefully that will generate some interest!

Why aren't Greeks recognized at your school and how do you have NPC chapters at your school if that is the case?

Canada has freaky laws, which the NPC groups understand.

jevans28 - there are some other Canadian Greeks on GC. Do a search on "Canada" in the Greek Life forum and you should be able to find some of them, or go to the forums of the sorority & fraternity chapters on your campus. They're more familiar w/ what you can and cannot do than us silly Yankees. :) Good luck!

One thing that was successful at my school were Go Greek shirts. Ours just said "Go Greek" on the front with a picture of a symbol from all 4 sororities. They were very simple and cost us $7 each. You could put something about where to find recruitment information on the back.

Since the reason that Greeks aren't recognized has to do with them being single gender organizations, I know that at least one school got an umbrella organization together and called themselves the "Friends of ___(university name)__ Sororities". There were no rules about who could join that organization, so men could join it too, if they wanted to. All advertising for recruitment and stuff went through that organization.

In the past few years we've had around 80 girls actually go through recruitment...this year it was over 100. And since there are only five sororities, that extra 20 or 30 does make a difference.

There were several things we did to help get girls enrolled. For instance, we have an info fair for freshmen during the summer where they pre-register. We pushed every Greek organization to have their own table with the other major clubs on campus, and Panhellenic had one as well. We had stacks of registration forms at our table and a camera to take pictures for the entries. We let girls turn in their checks prior to recruitment week and if they DID pay on the spot, we gave them their t-shirts there. We made sure our recruitment team was at every guys' rush party and every freshman orientation event. We made separate facebook profiles for recruitment so that we could communicate with girls without giving away our affiliations and we made a facebook group for girls with interest in recruitment...I went through and invited every freshman girl I could find. The recruitment team had messenger bags for class that said "Go greek" on them, and we encouraged the PNMs to wear the shirts we gave them. We pushed the sororities to be as friendly as possible. The recruitment team went out together around town a lot to places where we knew freshmen would show up...it's a small town, so there's not many choices which made our job easier. We held an interest meeting a week before to answer any questions they might have and we posted about 8 million flyers around campus...

Basically we made ourselves as available as possible and made sure they couldn't miss us. If you can get a ton of girls to just show up, you have more chances of getting a solid number follow through.

My school - 30 years ago; it's probably not permitted now - divvied up the incoming freshman women, and volunteer sorority women became pen pals for a group during the summer prior to matriculation.

It would seem to me if you don't have a formal greek system to get in your way, that might work. Today you'd probably use e-mail, of course, but the idea is the same.

Each sorority woman generally simply befriends the incoming freshmen. While it was permitted to mention sorority membership, I know my "big sis" (yes, that's what they were called) simply mentioned that she was a Delta Gamma. She went on to answer questions I had about school, what to expect, what the routine would be like for the first few weeks (we didn't have a formal orientation, either), etc.

That way, when I got to school, I had at least one friendly face.

Then the campus greeks helped us with move-in, though I didn't realize it. I was just naive enough to think this was a really, really friendly campus. Since no one in my family had ever gone to college, much less gone greek, I had no idea what those things on their shirts might be. That's probably not going to happen in today's world, but you never know.

I don't think that any of the "marketing" type stuff (t-shirts, pendrops, fliers, chalking) works. Authentic interaction with women does work. I was skeptical of Greek life myself when I got to Maryland, since I had heard weird stories from a friend who had just begun pledging down South. What changed my mind was meeting sorority women in real situations (class, in my case) and talking with them. If you have every woman in the Panhellenic community meet 5 (or 10 or 15 or more) women and make friends with them, you've just made your pool a bit larger.

I disagree because I think on our campus it did make a huge difference. On campuses where Greek life is peripheral, sometimes low PNM numbers is just a result of incoming freshman not KNOWING that Greeks even exist, or how to become one. Our Greek adviser said we should strive to make them think Greek life was something everyone on campus just DID...we are definitely a minority, but the sheer volume of our advertisements made us look much bigger.