You can tell a lot about how strong greek life is going to be on campus without ever seeing greeks.
It's a commuter school? Well subtract all the commuters, two-thirds of the people living in dorms, take 5-10% of what's left and that's probably in the same hemisphere as your totals.
What's the entertainment access? If you're in the middle of nowhere, there's very limited options to go out both locally and in commuting distance, there's not public stuff (river/lake/beach/etc), etc.. and the majority of students are going to hate life. Then, you'll have a massive greek system, cause the motivation and value of being part of it are huge. You're in Hawaii, so I'm pretty sure you're on the other end of that spectrum. Most people probably don't need you to have a good time, either in reality or perception.
What's the housing situation? You said you don't have a greek row, which is fine, most places don't. But I don't know what houses you do have. If they're either none or crap hole little run down places, then that's no motivation to join. If they're nice places with big common areas and lots of rooms that people want to live in (especially if you can have meal service and make it cheaper than campus while getting better quality), then that'd be a draw.
What kind of greek tradition is there? Is it a lot of international students or first generation college students? Do a high percentage of students have parents that were greek? Is a large chunk of the faculty or administration greek? What about alumni support? So, pretty much bad on all that right?
You're also in Hawaii (we got that established right?
) which means most nationals aren't going to consider expansion there just because of the cost of doing business. Having a consultant drive a rent car a hundred miles to from a visit at an existing chapter to another school that would potentially bring in another 10k a year is reasonable. Buying tickets to Hawaii while still only getting that same income is just not worth it.
My point is the accepting the things you cannot change part of who you are. Once you've done that then you can understand what you can
realistically improve and what you have to do to accomplish that.
So... I like your idea of getting with the University to conduct a session during orientations. Talk to your headquarters about year round recruitment, both on campus an in high schools. You need to not wait around to see what shows up to formal rush. You need to make recruiting automatic and part of your constant culture. That gives you a good chance to do values based stuff which can make your chapter better fast. Marketing is good too.
Strategically though, you need to look at why your members are willing to pay dues. That's probably because they just stumbled into rush and learned to love it in pledgeship. But, if you asked them if they'd be willing to pay their dues amount to get intramurals, the social events you do, etc without a fraternity being part of the equation, most would say no. I'm in the slightest saying your fraternity should be about those things, but you need to make members feel like they're getting their money's worth. When they don't that hurts collections and retention, which screws your finances. But, from the outside, if the perception is the benefits are not worth the costs, then people aren't going to join. You need to work on those perceptions and be able to sell the economies of scale you get by pooling resources that makes things possible no other student can have access to.
That and just learn to rush & retain better. Make the best of what you got and leave it better than you found it. Don't try to turn Hawaii into Ole Miss, or even USC, cause it'll never happen.
If you enjoy the current size of your "right-sized" chapter, why would you want a sharp increase in membership?
Hybrid Mode
