How do you keep track of recruits during rush? Feedback needed for rush mgmt software

[Psi U MC Vito]

Originally Posted by daaaveg

Hey guys,

I recently graduated from the University of Arizona and was involved in the greek system all 4 years. After participating in our chapter's rush every spring and fall my roommate and I realized how hard it was to keep track of the 1,000 or so kids that came through the house every rush season. Our sign in system was outdated (paper and pen) and our rush chairs were using excel to manually enter the kid's information into a computer. We realized how time consuming and inefficient the entire rush process was, so we are trying to fix it.

A few weeks ago my roommate and I began building a web based rush management application. It will allow chapters to track and manage recruits throughout the entire rush process through our website. Our goal is to make the application as simple and easy to use so that chapters can streamline their rush operations. This is where you guys come in. We have the bare bones of the website built so far (create events, sign in sheets, upload pictures of recruits, a few other things). We would like you guys to help us by letting us know what other features you would like to see built that you think would be helpful to you. Any feedback would be awesome!

A few questions we have:

-What information do you require from the potential recruits when they arrive? (for example, my chapter required their name, hometown, state, GPA, phone number, email, whether or not they are a legacy, hobbies, and a favorite quote)

-what bid statuses does your chapter have? (for example, throughout rush my chapter gave recruits a status of none, callback, invite night, pref dinner, and bid)

-what is your primary way of contacting the recruits? (email, calling them, or something else)

-please provide any other features you think would be helpful for you to manage your chapter's rush process

We hope to have a first version up and running in the next couple weeks so that we can do some testing during this upcoming rush season. If any of you guys are interested in becoming private beta testers to help us with the design and flow of the site before we launch it publicly, please let me know by PM'ing me.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Dave

Um how exactly would this make things more efficient?

[excelblue]

I'm actually also developing a similar webapp for the same purpose!

Thing is, purpose-built tools are always more efficient than general tools, given that they're done right. For example, I'm pretty sure several orgs have spreadsheets keeping track of this info, but it's somewhat inefficient.

What's most important is not what the app does but how it does it. For example, one of the main issues my chapter identified was proper followup. Some mediocre PNM might be called by two different brothers at the same time, while a great PNM we all want might fall thru the cracks and get no contact for more than a week.

To address that, the most important feature in my app is making it easy to figure out exactly who did what and is going to do what with each PNM. There is info about each event they attended, how they acted at that event, as well as any scheduled events. By the end of recruitment, they will probably have a two-page long profile.

In a spreadsheet, it's very awkward to store this info and then to sort it based on importance. Same applies to good ol' paper/pencil methods. Hence, the custom app.