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I know this thread is incredibly old, but I was just google surfing and founding it and thought some of you might want an update.
The strategy we decided to adopt was one of basically suspending all other activities to focus on recruitment and basically starting the whole chapter over. Since most of us were graduating within the next year, we set out to find the core of the "New ZBT". Also, we learned that a bunch of freshmen would be starting school over the summer and decided to target them.
Beginning with the last few weeks of spring term and continuing throughout the summer and into the fall, we had barbecues in strategic locations close to freshmen offering free food to anybody who came. During the summer these were advertised prominently in the school newspaper. This enabled us to build up a solid list of potential guys. Also, we sent out a good mailer to every incoming freshman, however, every chapter at our campus does this, so you have to just to keep up with the Joneses. BTW, I graduated and moved out of state after the Spring so everything after this I've just heard from the people who are still there.
For Fall Rush we rented out the President's Box at the football stadium. This location was not only swanky and offered a view of football practice, but it was pretty close to a lot of freshman dorms and separated us a bit from the other fraternities who had houses. Whenever we rushed on campus near other houses when we didn't have one, I always thought it made us look really bad. From that fall, we got 8 new brothers, 7 freshmen and 1 junior. We only had 2 actives going into that semester, so we theoretically grew the colony by 500%. We continued a similar program into the fall, gaining 4 new members during spring rush, one of the top spring rush totals on campus. We currently have 14 brothers, most of which will be sophomores, and they will be moving back into the on-campus house next year. I'm really proud of them and looking forward to returning to my chapter, which was once on its deathbed, next year for their first Homecoming back in the house.
I'd like to point out that this strategy in no way involved Sorority help. I stated before that with 8 sororities and 32 fraternities, they aren't really willing to help, but some of the people here really couldn't understand that. Tech is an extremely unique campus and it took us awhile to figure out a method that works there.
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