Potential improvements to invite matching?

[DeltaBetaBaby]

I was thinking about release figures and software and all that, and if your chapter has a return rate lower than in previous years, you can get burned. You are supposed to invite enough girls each round that the number of girls you have at each party equals the number of girls remaining in recruitment divided by the number of chapters.

So, let's say there are 200 girls in recruitment, ten chapters on campus and 5 parties this round. You want 20 girls at each party, for a total of 100. If you are expecting a return rate of 100%, you issue 100 invites. If you are expecting a return rate of 50%, you issue 200 invites. 66%, 150 invites, etc.

The problem comes in where you are expecting 66% return, and only get 50%. Now you have 75 women attending, where you'd like to have 100.

So, two crazy suggestions, let me know what you think:

1) If a chapter's total number of women returning is not enough to fill up the number of parties - 1, they only hold the number - 1. In the above example, if you had fewer than 80 attending, you would only hold 4 parties instead of 5. This helps the parties look fuller, and gives the chapter a break.

2) Allow a second invitation list below the first one, so if not enough women accept, it goes to the second group, as in final bid matching. In the above example, you could submit 150 invitations, plus up to 50 others you wouldn't mind inviting if you weren't limited by the number of invitations. If only 75 women accept from the first group, the software looks at the second list, and if any of those women do not have a full schedule, they are added to your party list.

I know that to do this right, you would technically have to rank the second list, but chapters could do it totally randomly and still come out better than if they didn't have a second list. I suspect in most cases, too, the second list would not be everyone else, but may be short enough to rank.

I am certain that software could handle these suggestions with little additional work for the greek life office, so what do you guys think the pros and cons are?