Fraternity Recruitment Events Fall '09 - An Overview

CFA's main role in fraternity recruitment is to facilitate the meeting of the fraternity men and unaffiliated men, mostly by hosting events that prospective members would want to come to.  It's a good system, and it leaves room for the individual chapters to recruit in their own unique ways.  And a lot of the recruitment events this fall were successful in bringing the two groups of dudes together.

Meet the Greeks is the first and definitely the biggest of these events, where every chapter, fraternities and sororities, just pile onto Yates Field and grab at everyone semi-interested freshman who is lucky enough to walk by.  OK, I make it sound way more intense than it really is.  In truth, it's a lot of people hanging out, cooking, throwing a Frisbee, and chatting it up with people who want to get to know individual chapters more.  And it is a great opportunity for fraternities to communicate with each other as well on a brother to brother level, whereas usually the communication is primarily president to president.  There's nothing like a little interfraternalism to get the year started.h

The Greek Recruitment Reception is a similar event in theory, although it is slightly more formal and inside the SC.  In practice, the sororities do a lot better in numbers at the reception than the fraternities.  But we did have a solid like twenty to thirty prospective fraternity members come to the event, which is at least double last year's numbers, so it felt like a success to us.  From what I could tell, there were a lot of great conversations happening, people getting to know people, and eating Bloom's cheese trays.

However, the Fraternity Fair, a supplement to the event from prior years, "Finding the Fraternities", was not so well attended.  We had plenty of pizza, which was mostly eaten or taken home by brothers in attendance, and it was an awfully relaxed atmosphere, but I think maybe three or four prospective guys showed up.  BUT, I believe this was just a sign telling us that maybe freshmen men were just recruitment pooped at this point, and had had enough of these meet and greets, and perhaps they wanted to move on to more chapter individual events, like the open houses that came in the next two weeks.

But aside from the open houses, CFA held one more event, called the Fired Up Friday Pig Roast.  You can read more about it in John Hill's blog, but suffice it to say there were a ton of people who came to the event, the pork was cooked beautifully, and Ian Fenwick is the man.

So we lived and learned this fall in fraternity recruitment, and overall, 151 men joined our fraternity community as new members, ready to begin the awesome experiences of the new member process.  Happy pledging!