[clemsongirl]

I'll use my own chapter as an example of this, at the risk of sounding like I'm bragging. My undergraduate chapter is that top-tier rockstar recruiting chapter, with incredibly high return rates and pledge classes full of women who wanted to be there more than anything in the world. Our success is a combination of all the things everyone's shared.

Girls come in to Clemson knowing the names of some sororities ahead of time, including ADPi. The university is about 70% in-state students, but it's a lot higher in my chapter, and virtually no one is not from the South. We had at least six younger siblings of active chapter sisters join this year as well as goodness knows how many other legacies, and oodles more who knew someone from cheer/dance/pageants/church groups/high school. Girls who already know someone in the chapter have a leg up in recruitment (and this is true everywhere) simply because it's not the first time two strangers are meeting each other and sizing each other up for fit. We already know if you will or won't fit because four chapter sisters spent three years cheering with you in high school.

Being an ADPi in South Carolina also "means something" in a way that joining other chapters doesn't. And I say this as a lifelong New Englander from a corner of the world where joining a sorority means as much to the public as your shoe size. But there's a lot of chapters in the state which produce a lot of alumnae and legacies, a lot of prominent women or family of prominent women who are members, and when your chapter churns out Miss South Carolina candidates every year it's not hard to see them and think "this is the chapter for beautiful, accomplished women, and if I join them I will also be beautiful and accomplished". Seeing runner-up Miss America Ali Rodgers speak at Preference Night worked on me.

The other secret to high return rates that hasn't been touched on as much is only inviting back women who want to be there. When 1000 PNMs go through the first round of recruitment and you can only invite 300 back to the next, you want to invite back women who you already know want to come back. If 200 of those 1000 PNMs want nothing to do with ADPi for whatever reason, we had the luxury of not inviting them to the next round. That's RFM working as it's supposed to, but I think there's a difference between the chapter everyone wants and the chapter who knows who wants them and only invites those girls back.

I disclaim all this by saying that I personally don't embody a lot of this, and I think y'all know that-I'm from the North (very few of us in my chapter) and I didn't do cheer/dance/pageants/church groups/high school with anyone from my chapter. I also was never the recruiting face of my chapter, and while I resented it at the time I now understand that we weren't trying to recruit more Northerners with no in-house connections.

I think this approach is repeated with different chapters in different areas of the country: they know who they want, and they make those girls feel wanted along with everyone else by association, then the cycle repeats itself the next year.