Chapter divided over image building

[TweedleDee199]

My chapter went through this phase while I was a collegiate, although we were an older chapter. We didn't feel like "the awkward chapter" but that was definitely how we were seen. There was one chapter activity that helped facilitate a productive discussion about a collective vision. Everyone was asked to write down their own personal rankings of all the sororities on campus, including our own. Sure enough, there was quite a bit of variety in how we all saw things. Discussing why people put chapters in a particular spot helped us hone in on concrete things we could emulate. Things like social functions were a little more controversial, but a major takeaway was that almost all of us admired the really involved chapters and saw value in boosting our philanthropy attendance. We couldn't go from "the leftovers" to a high recruiting chapter overnight, but with enough buy in we could become "the chapter that always shows up" almost instantly. We started tossing extra money in our philanthropy budget, registering extra teams and inviting coaches over to chapter dinner the following week. Our community service chair started reaching out to fraternities we didn't usually mix with to plan service events and making sure our members always showed up to those events in force. Slowly, people started to know us as the chapter we were then, and not the chapter we were ten years before.