The chapter I advise has done it a couple of ways. When I first started with them, they were COB-ing ALL.THE.TIME. and running 2 new member classes and 2 initiations per semester for most semesters. This was because they thought this was the best way to meet national expectations, but it got in the way of other sorority objectives. We now are taking a different approach, which works something like this:
We will start COB as soon as total is reset after formal recruitment. (We are experiencing a delay on this due to the holiday weekend and a couple other things, but will have our new total soon and are holding recruitment events in preparation of the ability to issue bids)
We have specific date after which the opportunity to add to to the current new member class will close. It's fairly short - about 2 weeks. Once this window closes, the chapter will still do some recruitment activities but will downshift for a while. Our efforts will kick up again later in the fall semester and then the chapter will do a big push very early in the semester to get more women. Then we will run a spring new member class.
This approach worked fairly well last year and we hope it will this year as well.
