Archive for January, 2008

The Question of QUALITY

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

By Josh Orendi 

Often, fraternity and sorority members argue that they are about "quality not quantity," we sing songs about being the best group on campus, and we edify each other after the formal rush period with tears and confirming bear hugs as we tell one another that again this year "we got the best guys/girls on campus" to join our group. 

Quality ". We know the independent students on campus, administration, and campus newspaper question the quality of our membership. Why? Our founding values are so noble and we take such care in membership selection. We are an experiment of what happens when the campus's best students assemble together in lifelong bonds of brotherhood/sisterhood. Our organizations are a demonstration of excellence. Right?

Sometimes we feel pride, excitement, fun, or friendship at deep levels and mistake this for a quality organization. To draw a parallel, when some people meet a person that makes them feel excited, aroused, or validated they jump into the proverbial deep end and you hear them tell others that they met the "perfect person" ‐ a quality relationship that is sure to last " this time.

To offer a somewhat objective look at the quality of your chapter, I've brainstormed a few dozen questions you can use to measure the state of the organization. There's no scientific method to my madness. I simply hope to encourage chapter members to reconsider their definition of "quality" and the process they are using to cultivate both quality members and a quality membership experience. 

1. Are your members setting the curve or trying to make the curve?
2. Would you let your biological sister date the average guy in your chapter?
3. Would you feel comfortable letting a random member of your chapter explain the fraternity to your mother?
4. When your members say they will do something or be somewhere, do you often find yourself disappointed?
5. Is your membership 100% drug free?
6. If the chapter received an unexpected donation of $10,000, would that money be used to advance the purpose of the organization or entertain the members?
7. Is service something your members do because they believe deeply in the value of giving?
8. Are women referred to in chapter meetings with words that evoke respect and equality?
9. Is your chapter house perceived by the community as a valuable part of the neighborhood?
10. Are the lifelong members of your fraternity continuing to support the fraternity after they graduate from college?
11. Do your alumni speak of their fraternity experience in the present tense or past tense?
12. If a member knew you were skipping a class, an appointment, or another commitment, would they hold you accountable?

(more…)

Posted in Random Thoughts | No Comments »

Make it Work

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

By Matt Mattson

So, I admit it. I watch (and enjoy) the show, Project Runway" How can you not love it! I claim that I watch because of Heidi Klum, but the truth is, I watch because it is just good T.V. (at least the best T.V. available during the writer's strike).

You're wondering" what in the world does this have to do with recruitment? Three words" MAKE IT WORK.

On Project Runway, the sharp-eyed fashion coach Tim Dunn can often be heard to say, at stressful moments, when time is running out, and when the designers are feeling hopeless… "Make it work." And somehow, those three little words push the designers to take their mess of fabric and create a masterpiece.

There is power in a shortened time period ‐ there is power in a situation when there is no choice but success ‐ there is power in a leader saying confidently, Make it work.

As you are experiencing the first part of this Spring 2008 semester, think about how you can maximize the power of a shortened time period to drive results. What challenges can you present to your members to drive effective recruitment results?

For the collegiate fraternity/sorority world, the concept of a results-driving shortened time period has been somewhat skewed. I'm talking, of course, about RUSH. Rush uses the concept of limiting the amount of time well (we feel positive pressure to get results), but what we're trying to accomplish in rush might be the wrong thing (we're trying to build lifelong friends in the course of a week" using cheesy, impersonal events, skits, and t-shirts). So let's take the best or rush and see if we can improve upon the idea.

Imagine gathering 4 of your best members together to spend five days meeting people. All five of you sit down and make a challenge to one another: "I dare us to meet 100 non-members in the next five days. If we do it, we'll all head to the Major League Baseball game on Saturday" if we don't, we'll all spend Saturday re-painting the house. Who's in?"

Imagine formal recruitment week just ended for your sorority community and your chapter ended up with about 4 fewer women than it hoped for. You say to the 7 most active girls in the chapter, "Listen, we did great during recruitment this week, but I think that the eight of us could easily get four more women to bring our chapter to total. If we just do COB like normal, we won't even have a plan for how to recruit those girls for another month" then we'll all have lost interest because we're having so much fun with the girls we did get. So I challenge us to spend the next three days doing three things" First, the eight of us are going to spend tomorrow meeting 5 non-Greek girls each (that will give us 40 names to work with). Second, we're going to spend day 2 getting as many of them as we can to go to lunch with small groups of us. On day 3 we're going to get as many of those girls as possible to go to some small activity with us in the evening (the movies, coffee, studying, work out, etc.). We won't have totally recruited them during this time, but if we've built decent relationships with even 10% of them, we'll be really close to filling our new member class within only three days!"

Imagine you're a member of the Campus Conservation Club ‐ a group of students that care about the environment. A major political decision is being made in congress three days from now about greenhouse gases and potentially making a major impact to reduce global warming. You've got three days to do two things" 1) Canvass campus teaching students how to call their members of congress in the next two days, and 2) Asking every student you talk to if they might be interested in coming to an information session about the Campus Conservation Club happening in conjunction with the vote in congress three days from now.

Use time to your advantage, but don't try to squeeze the creation of a meaningful lifelong relationship into a short time period. Use short amounts of time to build your prospect list, capitalize on momentum, or to kick-off a major recruitment initiative.

Make it work.

Posted in General Membership Orgs, Recruitment Tips, Sorority Specific | No Comments »

Automaticruitment (Automatic Recruitment)

Friday, January 25th, 2008

by Matt Mattson

This blog post is neither about recruiting robots nor is it about recruiting like robots. It is about building an automatic system for great recruitment results (think Henry Ford + deep relationships).

Do you have a consistent, repeatable system for long-term recruitment results? 

This is a question we ask toward the end of many of our Dynamic Recruitment Workshops, and at its core, the question is asking whether your organization has built a system to make getting a high quantity of high quality members automatic.

Most organizations we work with definitely don't have an automatic recruitment process. They're often on automatic when it comes to rush, but their automation is about doing the same things that have always been done and then living in the panic of trying to survive another semester.

The best organizations in the world have built a system that automatically drives hundreds, if not thousands, of PROSPECTIVE MEMBERS onto their names list, and then do natural things to build natural relationships. Instead of building a separate recruitment machine (think: 1 week of intense shallow recruiting), what if you could automate results through normal everyday activities?

Start by considering these three questions:

1. How can you take what your organization naturally does and get recruitment results from it?

2. How can you gather names and contact information of prospects without even being there?

3. How could you take an organizational problem and turn it into something to get automatic recruitment results?

Here are some quick examples of ideas that might help your organization automate its recruitment processes:

*My organization has natural cliques. You know, the jocks, the studiers, the social butterflies. For a long time we thought that was a problem, then we realized it was just reality and we should maximize it. Now we reward each of those small groups of friends within the organization for doing what they like to do with each other (the jocks for playing sports, the studiers for studying, etc.), but only if they do those things every week and include prospective members in the mix. We end up building better relationships with prospective members than during intense recruitment events, and it is stuff those members do anyway.

*My organization is the group that, among other things, organizes the van rides to major school sporting events and the big city nearby (on weekends when there is no game). We have tons of students signing up to ride the vans every weekend, so we make sure our members get to know the riders, and then follow up with them afterward (and it isn't as awkward as cold-calling potential members).

*Our group always has lunch at the student commons building on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We realized that if we just ate together it was fun, but it seemed elitist and kind of rude. We now have a policy that everyone has to bring a non-member as a friend on either Tuesday or Thursday, and the organization buys those non-member's lunches. It has worked great, we're the talk of the commons on those days, and we've made some great friends (and recruited tons of new members) just by doing that.

*Our group always loves to play pick-up football as often as we can during the fall. We realized that it was a whole lot easier to invite strangers to an immediate game of casual pick-up football than it was to invite them to some strange “recruitment event.” So before we play we run around for 10 minutes trying to double the size of our group of players… It is amazing the people you meet and the relationships that we build just by doing that. And it is free and takes no planning!

Posted in General Membership Orgs, Recruitment Tips | No Comments »

Do You Have a Recruitment Coach?

Friday, January 18th, 2008

by Matt Mattson

The personal performance improvement model known as “coaching” has been on my mind a lot lately… I'm working on three different major projects that involve taking lessons learned from the world of coaching and applying them to the work that I do. 

If you're not familiar with coaching (other than your High School JV Basketball Coach), check out the concept of “life coaching,” ”success coaching,” or “business coaching” at the International Coach Federation's website. According to them, coaching is:

Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.

Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches help people improve their performances and enhance the quality of their lives.

Two of the projects I'm working on are college student organization related (fraternities specifically). The first involves a unique way to think about your organization's alumni advisory team. I was asked just the other day to serve on a fraternity chapter's advisory team (even though I'm not from that chapter - cool). They asked me to serve in a specific role: LIFE COACH for older undergraduates and new alumni. I just thought this was a really interesting way to think about alumni advisors, and wouldn't it be a great recruitment message to be able to say, “our chapter provides members not only with a network of alumni, but a professional life coach to help transition from college to the 'real world’.”

The other project I'm working on is rolling out a new package of Phired Up services based on the concept of coaching. We're considering Extreme Recruitment Makeover as a name for it, but we're not sure yet. Keep your ears open. The concept is a year-long partnership with a chapter that would guarantee a return on investment — we would package recruitment products and services in a customized way to drive recruitment results to a chapter. This will be an elite group of chapters that get chosen to participate, but if they do get chosen, we’ll help them completely revolutionize their recruitment processes and their chapter over the course of a year.

If you're interested in being that chapter, send an e-mail to info@phiredup.com.

But more to the point, are you using your organization's alumni as coaches? Are you building mutual alliances with your advisors and asking them to push you like the best football coach you ever had did? Is someone truly coaching you to become the best member, leader and recruiter you can be?

If you've ever had a great coach in sports, think about how they made the team better. Who can you ask to coach you and your organization to become championship caliber.

The truth is, recruitment success depends on you becoming an all-star at certain skills and patterns of behavior, but many of us need support, challenging, advice, and a consistent mentor to truly become our best at recruiting.

Think about who could be your coach. Schedule a time to talk with them today.

Posted in Random Thoughts, Recruitment Tips | No Comments »

Are You Phired Up? Why?

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

THIS POST CONTAINS VIDEO THAT CAN BE ACCESSED HERE. 

by Matt Mattson

Stop Talking. Start Doing.

Thanks to IBM, the world has been further introduced to the power of getting PHIRED UP! This video clip of IBM's recent commercial is AWESOME! Those of us at Phired Up Productions can't stop watching the clip, and we're mostly excited because we can now say that we were years ahead of IBM in the development of this concept. :-)

But what can we learn from “Innovation Man?” Well, this clip gets us Phired Up because we know that if you want recruitment results it is about much more than getting “Phired Up.” Results come from action. Stop talking, start doing, as the commercial implores.

What have you started DOING today to revolutionize your organization's recruitment practices? It is so easy to 1) complain about your membership problems, then 2) learn about new ways to recruit, then 3) get excited about those new ways to recruit and talk about them with fellow members… but if you stop there you've wasted a lot of valuable energy, time, and sometimes money.

If you've recently experienced a Phired Up program, STOP TALKING. START DOING. If you've recently read a Phired Up publication, STOP TALKING. START DOING. If you're new to Dynamic Recruitment, start by meeting a few new people today (then you’ll at least have a chance to recruit those few new people). 

This is why we firmly believe that you can't just bring in a motivational speaker to PHIRE YOU UP! This is why we provide resources, follow up, and continued education for your members to have not only excitement about the innovation of Dynamic Recruitment, but also practical applications and clear direction to get the results you desire. 

We hope you are PHIRED UP, but we also hope you are doing. 

Go get ‘em.

Posted in General Membership Orgs, Recruitment Tips | No Comments »