Quote:
Originally Posted by a.e.B.O.T.
The only advice I could give is that you should be careful with setting goals of committed pledges. It should be about finding quality, and not quantity. Falling short of a goal can be disheartening to many within the chapter, especially if it happens over a series of occasions. Secondly goals encourage members to vote for those less in quality in order to meet quota and get the most pledges, etc...
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Thank you everyone for the feedback. I wanted to post a follow-up now that summer rush is underway.
a.e.B.O.T- I appreciate your thoughts above. Based on your comments I pretty much did a 180 and took out head count expectations by the advisory team and the rush chair agreed. Not worrying about the numbers definitely seems to have made it easier to get good numbers since we are now up to 7 pledges, which for this chapter is a return to the kind of results we had back in my time with 100+ guys and the largest chapter house on campus. And they are solid guys too from good high schools.
Oldest Pledge- good suggestion on your part and based on what you said- the advisory team asked EC officers and the rush chair to think about who we lost during rush that we wanted, and why. And sometimes the answer is that they wanted something other than what we are about. The lesson I think was not to try and find a way to get everyone we might miss- but find out why we did not get people we really did want AND who would have been a good fit.
33girl- you raise a good point about having the big pool to select from, and our rush chair came up with the right answer. For state rush weekends- Fridays have been structured as very inexpensive events like BBQs where we could invite everyone and then pick our top candidates. Then the more expensive events like dinners, sporting events and concerts took place the next day only with people we invited back.
Summer rush has been a huge success so far, and I have to credit a lot of that to our rush chair, alumni chair and the outreach efforts they have made with our alumni.
By having a formal rush schedule in place, we knew going into the summer where we would be and when. That made it possible to get alumni involved- and when you add in dry recruitment that just set them on fire. Alumni don't seem to want to have keggers at their houses (I am being sarcastic here- I feel the same), but they will gladly have guys over to their home for a BBQ or sponsor sporting event tickets for dry rush. One group even set up a reception at their country club.
So I have to admit that having a formal dry recruitment schedule in place makes a huge difference. We have the results to prove it.
We'll see how the rest of the summer goes, but I have high hopes.