This article is Day 12 of the series: 31 Days to Better Fraternity Recruitment.
Tell me if this sounds familiar. The rush chair is given a budget of thousands of dollars, throws two weeks of hellacious events that cost a fortune in hopes of impressing an impressionable freshman into joining your fraternity. And as a result you end up spending about $500 for each guy who ends up becoming a new member.
Please believe me when I tell you this is the stupidest business decision you can make for your chapter.
Guys don’t join fraternities because of the food you give them or the places you take them. They don’t join because you have spent a fortune renting out Hooters or a bowling alley. They don’t join because of the rush t-shirts or free pizza.
Guys join fraternities because of the relationships they build with the existing brothers. And you don’t need to spend a fortune to cultivate those relationships.
The centerpiece of your rush strategy should be for individual brothers to rush guys in personal settings. From there, introduce them to the brotherhood by taking them by the house. No money has to be spent. Once you actually become friends with a potential new member, then rushing is actually quite easy.
And instead of using that money during rush, spend it during the semester on the brotherhood.
If you really want to use it for rush, use it to offset new member dues. Obviously the cost of joining a fraternity is one of the biggest barriers for accepting a bid – especially when the potential new member is pretty naïve to the fraternity scene. By minimizing this hurdle, you will definitely increase the likelihood that a guy will accept your invitation to join.
Or better than that, use the money saved to lower brotherhood dues. Everyone hates to pay money, and if you can lower the dues you will have happier brothers. Also, this will help to minimize a big barrier to joining – the cost of brotherhood dues.
The point here is there are a ton of better options to spend this money than blowing it during rush. The sooner your fraternity realizes that there is not a correlation between the amount you spend and the number of new members you get the better.
To learn more, check out our most in-depth article on fraternity recruitment: The Complete Guide to Fraternity Recruitment.