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Originally Posted by Heather17
I find this very interesting--because do we not spend a majority of time as alumnae members of sororities, rather than collegiate? Just food for thought.
I've been to several Panhellenic Luncheons over the past few years and walked into rooms where there are by far more alumnae than collegians. There are organizations with more than 300 alumnae chapters to 125 collegiate chapters. I would argue that this drastically changes the focuses of those kinds of organizations--that they do have to be significantly more focused on alumnae needs and programming, than a group with only a few alumnae chapters.
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Isn't that usually because it's an alumnae Panhellenic luncheon?
I mean, I'm thinking of the one we have here where the alums who never do anything else all year turn out in full force because they can wear giant hats and drink martinis at noon.
You also have to look at how the alumnae chapters are set up. Maybe an org has 300 ACs vs 125 CCs - however, the average membership of the ACs is 10 and the average membership of the CCs is 75. Plus sometimes ACs can overlap for a myriad of reasons that I don't want to get into or my head will pop off.
Sometimes I think we'd have more alum involvement and stronger alum chapters if we made it more difficult to charter them - i.e., more like chartering a collegiate chapter. For a lot of groups, it's give us X number of names, send in your money, you're ready to go. Can you imagine chartering a collegiate chapter like that? I doubt very much that any of the NPHC graduate chapters operate that way either.
If we want alums to be as involved as collegians are, maybe we have to treat alum membership a little more like collegiate membership.