Hi There...

Sorry to intrude on your board, but it sounds as if your sorority faces many of the problems mine does. We are also a "special interest sorority", and we lose a lot of potential new members to the other social sororities on campus because they can rush new freshman, whereas we require our PNMs to have a college GPA.

Unforunately, I don't have much advice for "tricks" for getting around this problem. We also do a Fall and Spring rush, Spring being when we mainly take in freshman (now that they have a college GPA) and fall being for upperclassmen.

One of the things we have done in the past (and actually the way I ended up getting into DO before I knew about the social sororities on campus) is to hold rush early, early, early in the year. Specifically invite freshman girls (as well as the upperclassmen you'd like to bid) and explain to them that while you can't bid on them now, you would like them to come back in Spring. My pledge class was rushed very intensely from the beginning of the school year in fall, and we ended up being one of the biggest pledge classes our group has ever seen. Most of us went to the Fall semester rush, and were told that we could come back in spring, but then after Fall rush the actives called us, went out to lunch with us, etc... really got to know us.

I'm an alumnae now, and my sorority has moved away from doing this, which has just killed us in numbers. In retrospect, I probably would have liked to pledge one of the NPCs on campus, but we had a chapter bylaw that forbid us from being in both DO and an NPC. However, the rushing technique I described above was very effective in keeping me interested in DO while overlooking the NPCs.

Hope this helps...

Ginger