Networking (like a SHARK) Week

by Matt Mattson

shark-weekThere’s a big week coming up!

No, not Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, although that is a wonderful time of the year.

On many campuses around the country a week called “Rush Week” or “Formal Recruitment Week” is just around the corner.  This is often, unfortunately, a week built for sororities and fraternities to pressure strangers into a rushed decision about lifelong membership in their organization.

We at Phired Up have plenty of problems with relying on formal recruitment as your only means of organizational growth, but there are also some things to be gained from a highly intense week of work to grow your organization.

The trick is, to focus on GROWING YOUR GROUP’S SOCIAL NETWORK, not on rushing those poor unsuspecting first-year students into joining.

Take the intensity of Shark Week, leave out the fakeness and pressure of Rush Week, and create something brand new: Networking (like a Shark) Week.

The objective of this week of networking would be simple — your organization should build as many meaningful connections as possible within 7 days.

My best recommendation for how to practically do a week of intense networking might be summed up in this blog titled, “Be Nice to People (at least for a week)”.  Read that.

But in a more general sense, change the focus of these first weeks of school.  Instead of trying to force the entire recruitment, membership selection, and life-long decision making process of joining an organization into one or two weeks, direct your chapter to do one simple thing — build more meaningful relationships.  Have an intense week of hard work, lots of handshakes, small activities, phone calls, E-mails, texts, Facebook work, referrals, and more — just make the point of it not to get people to join, but to build relationships.

Think about how differently the people you’re interacting with will experience your organization.  Instead of seeming like a sleazy used car salesperson trying to pressure them into a high-dollar, high-risk decision (joining your group), you seem like an individual who is actually trying to exemplify a primary purpose of your organization — networking (being social).

You can measure how successful Networking (like a Shark) Week is in a really simple way.  How many names did you add to your Names List?  It is absolutely reasonable, on almost every campus in North America, for a fraternity or sorority to be able to add 300-750 names to their Names List in any given week  (especially a week laden with the tenacity of a shark).

A great place to start would be to take the “Say Hi Pledge“.