EkuKappaSig:
As nobody else has yet responded to your post, I have taken it upon myself to be the first responder.
First of all, please do not be upset that nobody else has responded. There are just a few people who post with any degree of frequency on this site ... no more than five or ten ... and most of them, including myself, are alumni and thus probably not very knowledgeable about current recruitment ideas. The one present student who does post fairly regularly is chicostateksig. So perhaps he will respond with some info about recruitment activities in the
very competitive Greek scene at Cal State Chico.
Secondly, congratulations on your colony at Eastern Kentucky. For some inexplicable reason,Kappa Sigma was not among the fraternities that established chapters at EKU when its Greek system, or at least its national Greek system (there may already have been local fraternities) in the mid- to late-1960's. Virtually all our major rivals have had chapters at EKU since then, while year-after-year, decade-after-decade Kappa Sigma has remained conspicuously absent in Richmond. The Fraternity had a strong chapter at the University of Kentucky, then expanded to WKU, then to Louisville, and then to Morehead State, and, most recently to Murray State. A couple of years ago, we had an unsuccessful colony at NKU. Throughout all that, there
was the obvious void of a chapter at EKU. This always seemed even more incongruous to me given the fact that the Fraternity's long-time Executive Director, Mitchell ("Mic") Wilson, is a Kentuckian and UK alumnus, and thus, I thought, would have been pushing hard for an EKU chapter and thus a further Kappa Sig presence in the Bluegrass State. I personally sent
numerous letters and then, once the Internet came into being, numerous e-mails, to the Fraternity's HQ and to District Grand Masters for the State of Kentucky at the time, inquiring as to why Kappa Sigma had never yet colonized at EKU, and when we were finally going to do so. I never once received a substantive answer from anyone. So I, for one, am absolutely
ELATED that our fine Order AT LONG LAST has a presence at EKU. We are 40 years late in colonizing EKU, but as the old saying goes, "better late than never". I sincerely hope that your group prospers as a colony and is willing and able to petition for a charter as an active chapter of the Fraternity in reasonably quick time ... perhaps by the end of the 2009-2010 academic year or early next Fall.
As to recruiting ideas, I have been away from university for so long that I have no direct personal knowledge or experience with what might or might not work for your group, other than to say that whatever activities you engage in, the key things are for all your members to always be sincere and down to earth with all your rushees, don't put on any phoney airs, don't pretend to be anything you aren't, and always be sure to learn and remember your rushees' respective names. Nothing impresses a rushee (or women, or people one meets in any social or business context) than remembering his (or her) name, than being able to call him by his name in subsequent encounters after first having been introduced. It makes a
terrific first impression, tells the person that he is worth remembering, that he has something going for him, and makes him naturally respect you for having remembered his name out of all the others. That sort of thing, plus taking a genuine interest in the rushee, where he's from, what courses he's taking, what activities he enjoys, why he's interested in Kappa Sigma, and so on, or ultimately all far more important than any particular recruitment activity.
Of course, you first of all have to meet the rushee, get him in the door as it were, or else you never will have the opportunity to make the good first impression and then follow that up with sincere interest in the fellow. That, of course, takes us back to your original question. So here are some GENERAL suggestions that I can make:
1. observe what recruitment events other EKU fraternities, especially the larger, more successful ones engage in. Then do something similar. No one fraternity has exclusive rights to a particular activity, and if one group does something, there's no reason why you can't do something similar, especially if you do it better, more creatively, with some extra flare or spirit.
2. There are many members of various Kappa Sig chapters who have
Twitter accounts. Their tweets contain frequent mentions of rushing activities in their chapters. They often follow the
Twitter accounts of other Kappa Sigs. So once you locate one such
Twitter account, you then go to the "Following" links to other Kappa Sig
Twitter accounts, and before long you
can be following Tweets from 30 or 40 different chapters, with the number increasing all the time, and, as aforesaid, many of those accounts contain tweets that mention rush activities at their chapters. Here's a link to start, someone from Alpha-Eta Chapter at George Washington University:
http://twitter.com/KSAlphaEta. The "Following" links will take you to other Kappa Sig
Twitter accounts, and each of those accounts will take you to others.
3. If you know how to access the Brother Services section of the Kappa Sigma Website, you will find a link to a page entitled "Idea Bank", and one of the topics on that page is "Rush Ideas". I have no idea how helpful any of the posts there might be, but it only takes a few minutes to check it out.
4. Outdoor activities like paintball and river rafting or houseboating excursions, or going to a professional baseball/football/basketball/hockey game, are always popular. So are indoor activities like dodgeball or broomball (if you have an ice arena nearby), especially if you can combine them with a sorority or other women's group. Dodgeball and broomball are always
good activities for an exchange with a sorority, if not a recruitment activity.
5. I'm too old to know about it myself, but I've heard that “Guitar Hero” (or whatever the game is called, you'll probably know what I'm referring to better than I do) events at the chapter house, with pizza and beverages, have been very successful.
I know that many chapters hold a 'smoker' at their house on one night during the rush period, in which they play poker, smoke cigars (fancy or foul), and generally fart around with rushees whom they think would enjoy such a night. It's a great opportunity for rushees to get a feel for the house in a relatively informal setting, and for the actives to spend some valuable
one-on-one time with rushees, which often does not present itself during more planned, staged activities.
A time-tested activity is an alumni dinner attended by all the actives and hopefully a goodly number of alumni. Rushees are always impressed by alumni who come out to chapter functions, and recount the fun times they had as actives. It shows that the Fraternity truly is not for a day or a year alone. There are always a few alumni who can give entertaining and
persuasive talks/speeches at such affairs, and, at my chapter at least, we always pelted them with dinner buns when they first came to the podium, which the rushees found hilarious. Of course, as a colony, your group does not have any alumni. So such a dinner is not something you can yet put on.
I'm sure that your Area Recruitment Manger, Matt Rippetoe, has no end of proven rush ideas.
Well, as you have probably determined by now, rush/recruitment is not really one of my areas of knowledge. So I doubt that much of the foregoing had been too helpful. But at least it is a response, and hopefully it will prompt some others who have much better suggestions than mine. In closing, I'll go back to my initial comments: it's not so much what activity you undertake, but how you treat the rushees you do attract. Introduce yourselves to them, remember their names, take a genuine interest in them, make them feel that they are interesting and important
individuals who could
make a positive contribution to your colony cum chapter. Treat them the way you would want to be treated and remembered. That will earn their respect, and make them feel that they want to be a part of what you're offering, a once in a lifetime opportunity to be a founding father of a new fraternity chapter, a Kappa Sigma chapter, on the EKU campus .
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