Turbo Boost Your Recruitment Motivation

by Matt Mattson

When you look around your campus, do you see success stories?  Or do you see the same-old, same-old Greek organizations doing what they’ve seemingly always done?  Look around closely at other organizations on your campus?  Are they inspiring?  Do they challenge your concept of excellence?  Or are they just fighting to survive?

When it comes to recruitment (among other things) it is easy to get caught in a rut.  You look around and you see that you’re just as good as or slightly better than other chapters on campus, and that seems pretty good… yet you vaguely FEEL the problems that come with mediocre recruitment (cashflow, behavior issues, lack of recognition on campus, apathy, etc.).  While you know you can and should do better, there isn’t a lot of external motivation to change your behavior.

You need a TURBO BOOST!  Here are 5 ideas to turbo boost your motivation to recruit differently (and better):

1. Read these success stories.  Seriously.  Read how these chapters and inter/national organizations have dramatically changed for the better because of a change in recruitment processes (from static to Dynamic).

2. Call your inter/national headquarters and ask them to tell you about the biggest and best chapters in the country. Better yet, take a road trip to the biggest chapter in your fraternity/sorority at another college or university.


3. Attend a national or regional fraternity/sorority event (or a bigger interfraternal event like AFLV/NBGLC, SEIFC, SEPC, NGLA, etc.)

4. Find a chapter’s composite picture that has at least 50% more members than your chapter has and post a copy of it in your house or meeting area.

5. Calculate what your chapter’s budget could be if it had three times the members it has today.  Calculate the service hours and philanthropic dollars that a chapter twice your current size could accumulate.

BONUS IDEA:  Imagine you aren’t a Greek organization.  Imagine you’re just a group of dozens (maybe even hundreds) of the best of the best students from your campus all working toward a powerful, clear, emotional goal (caring for local foster children, traveling to Haiti to aid in relief, funding the education of underpriveleged youth in a nearby city, networking with the top business and political leaders in the world, etc.)  The only thing that holds you together is a set of shared values that you all commit to living up to every day.  What could you accomplish? If that doesn’t motivate you to want to recruit more people to help you, then I don’t know what will.

Go get ‘em.