Part 1. The beginning. Or the easy time.
This is inspired by the thread in the Rush Forum by wishinhopin that is trying to start a new National sorority chapter at her school. This is that thread:
Rush at USCS
I wanted to share some my own experiences as a chapter starter with her as well as some of the conclusions and ideas I have come to as a result. I am posting here because quite frankly her thread is WAY too long.
1. Its hard to be the primary founder
I had the idea of starting a fraternity chapter myself. I told some friends over a beer I would do it, and I was stuck. I had to do it. Usually its a small group, in my case it was just me. This was about January.
There is always a prime pusher, and its an awesome responsibility. If you are your group's prime mover it will probably fail if you quit or fold.
I spoke to a regional director of SAE and he said an entire interest group of over 20 members just folded because the prime mover didn't come back to school.
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2. NEVER talk to only one national organization at a time. It should be at least six.
While it was still just an idea in my head, I developed a criteria to determine which Fraternities to contact. For me they had to be among the largest, for future and resource reasons. And they also had to have chapters within a reasonable distance of my campus.
I had to have contacted no less than eight fraternities and spoke to their expansion people. Or in the case of SAM and DKE their regional directors.
This made things simpler because it put me in a position to move quickly, if one said no, or was taking too long, I had another in place.
And when the first one failed, casuing the loss of 70 males from the Greek system. I automatically had back-ups before the ink was dry.
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3. Talk to everyone, anyone, and make a list of them. Get them to sign if possible.
For an idea to take fruit it has to be spoekn out loud. I told my friends, my associates, people I just sat at lunch with. I brought it up in bar conversation. And hell, I exaggerated the amount of support I had. The idea is to cause excitement. And I spoke to a lot of people.
I would also take tentative agreements as solid.
I knew that most people would not come out and show up unless the National was right there. so I had direct happy supporters and "sleepers".
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4. If you entice the National to show, the people will come.
The National that I worked out an agreement with came to campus the end of February beginning of March. And recruitment was off.
They were doing something called a Cold Start where they go to a campus and just start without an organized interest group. Only it wasn't so cold at my campus. I had laid down the ground work, see above. And men came out of the wood work, maybe 30 I had spoken too directly, and 30 or so more, at the end of only one week!
We could have kept recruiting through a hundred or so.
We acted as an interest group and even participated in DZ's Fraternity Feud.
And then everything went horribly wrong and it all folded into itself.
I'll post the full details if people are interested. But suffice to say the National and I disagreed, there were problems with the school, and it didn't happen that semester.
Since I made no effort to hold the group together it disintegrated over the summer. See the first point about Prime Movers and think about a group that size going to pieces.
Continued next post: The bad year
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