Help! Ideas to Improve Greek Life on a small campus!

[PhiMuMagnolia]

Hello, fellow greeks,
I'm a Phi Mu at a small liberal arts college in PA. We are very excited to announce that next year, we will have an even number of fraternities and sororities on our campus!!!
What I want to know is, with this new even matching, how can we make this "not-so-greek" campus more greek?
What do you do when you pair up with sororities at homecomings/greekends, etc?
Besides Mixers, what do your sororities do for/with your fraternities and vice versa.
And a few questions I've always wanted to know the answers to:
What is a door song?
Do you really do "Support/crush" baskets (I think its a great idea, but I want to know if that would be weird, etc...
What other traditions to you have as Greeks, and can you explain them? I love Greek life and I really want to get my campus moving!

Love!

[preciousjeni]

If you go to school where I think you do, the administration isn't all that Greek friendly. Outside of getting Greek Life going on campus among the students, perhaps the GLOs could focus some energies on identifying why the administration feels the way it does and addressing those issues through joint programming with other organizations.

When the administration backs a Greek system, the individuals chapters benefit.

[33girl]

Don't be so quick to make everything a pairs deal between a fraternity & sorority even if there is an even number of groups. Even if there are (example) 4 of each, the fraternities can vary widely in size. Plus too much territorialism starts going on - Sorority A gets jealous if Fraternity B pairs w/ Sorority C, etcetera. If you haven't paired up for things like homecoming before, don't do it right away - give it a while for the new fraternity to get acclimated to campus.

Concentrate on getting the Greek system to work together as a whole rather than worrying about groups pairing off together.

[VandalSquirrel]

Originally Posted by 33girl

Don't be so quick to make everything a pairs deal between a fraternity & sorority even if there is an even number of groups. Even if there are (example) 4 of each, the fraternities can vary widely in size. Plus too much territorialism starts going on - Sorority A gets jealous if Fraternity B pairs w/ Sorority C, etcetera. If you haven't paired up for things like homecoming before, don't do it right away - give it a while for the new fraternity to get acclimated to campus.

Concentrate on getting the Greek system to work together as a whole rather than worrying about groups pairing off together.

Or if you want to have these events, have a rotating system or set up groups (even if they aren't paired) so there are a similar amount of participants or do things by percentage of members. If group A has 50 members, and group B has 20, doing a 30% of members participate eases the burden of smaller groups and/or colonies. Even consider having groups pair with residence halls or other types of living or student groups because it helps promote greek life to those who aren't members. Not that you can't have private parties (because that's a benefit of membership) but hosting things such as battle of the bands, canned food drives, blood drives, sporting tournaments, and other stuff that the whole campus can enjoy can help you dispel stereotypes.

[Zillini]

Panhellenic and IFC pair up sororities and fraternities for things like Homecoming. Since some of fraternieties so small compared to the sororities, there may be 2 assigned. This past spring my sorority did a very successful joint philanthropy event with a fraternity.

A door song is a hello song sung at the door during Formal Recruitment to greet PNM's. We don't do "crush baskets". (FYI I'd never heard of that until I saw it on the Greek tv show.) Every sorority sends some "Good Luck" munchies to each of the other sororities during Recruitment workshop week.

[PhiMuMagnolia]

Thank you for all of these great suggestions, and I can see what you mean about pairing off too soon. We're in the midst of our Greekend right now and it's not turning out as well as planned. I think we need to beef up Greek participation during homecoming next year- any ideas? We don't have a parade anymore- we used to do floats, but since the parade is out, so are they. Any homecoming ideas?