recruiting with no house
 

hi everyone, i was wandering, is it hard for a fraternity chapter to recruit when it does not have an official house, but instead has a few branch houses?

Depends on your campus culture. At my school, when Pike came on, they recruited very well with no house. At that time, they were the only group without a house. I don't know how they did it, but they consistently did very well.

Yeah, what Kevin said. It all depends what your campus is like.

If your school is a big competitive school in the SEC that has a ton of fraternities and everyone has a house, and you don't, then recruitment isn't easy at all.

But if your campus is a majority commuter campus where most students live off-campus and only a few, if any, fraternities have a house then it shouldn't be a problem.

my school is big,and does have over 20 fraternities but only 7-10 actually have real houses, and a few of those are not even good fraternities, like for example we have a chi psi and a alpha sigma phi, both of which have houses but nobody cares about them. while at the same time sigep had 20 pledges this past spring.

How can I phrase this.... I think that getting rid of a ranking mentality, and not putting down other houses/chapters, might help boost morale. If you boost morale, it will be evident on the faces and in the way that your actives present themselves.

Start working on the brothers who are already there. If you do the work from within, from increasing the bonds among the fraternity members to raising your gpa, people will notice that. People will want to be a part of that.

And for what it's worth structure does not necessarily a strong fraternity make. It has its obvious advantages, but there are a myriad of things that you can do to increase your fraternity's reputation. If you make something an issue, then others will see it as an issue as well.

I disagree. NPC groups work differently. Fraternities are highly competitive. Because of our lack of a NPC-style quota system, there are campuses where some groups will sign 50-man pledge classes while others will sign 1 or 2 man classes. Rankings and accomplishments matter. To say that "no one cares" about certain groups is probably right on the money.

To make it, you have to find a way to market yourself. Figure out why people pledged your group and not Sig Ep. Market yourself and continue to try to figure out new ways to market yourself.

Require your members to be active in at least one other student organization. Start thinking of rush as year-round.

At your size and in your environment, I'd focus on one prospect at a time. My chapter requires its members to at least try to replace themselves every year if possible. That means that they keep their ear to the ground as far as high school friends coming to school, make friends with guys in their classes, etc. Rush cannot just be the rush chair's job.

Remember that rush is the life blood of your chapter. If you fail there, your chapter fails. In the end, it's very simple -- hard work does pay off. The only thing I can say to you if you are failing at rush is that you need to try harder.

Good luck.