Let’s be honest here: your sorority chapter could stand a little more self-promotion.
Every chapter could.
On a campus shared with dozens of other sorority chapters, standing out can be a challenge.
But when freshmen arrive and Rush begins, how is your sorority separating itself from the other organizations?
Sure, your values, traditions, colors, and culture are different, but…
How are you communicating that to potential new members?
Better promotion extends beyond recruitment, too.
It also affects the attendance of your events.
For example, are you seeing attendance at your events from students outside your sorority?
If not, it’s time to take another look at your marketing process.
And that process begins with quality self-promotion.
Because when you promote yourself well, good things start to happen:
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Sorority recruitment interest skyrocket
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Chapter becomes more recognized on campus
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Event attendance and success improve dramatically
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Fellow students begin to understand and respect your chapter’s brand
So, are you ready to start promoting?
Here are the 6 Panhellenic promotional tools to make your chapter the big name on campus.
6. Start a Blog with Wordpress
There are few other media as effective for delivering thoughts as a blog site, so start with Wordpress.
Easy to set up, a Wordpress blog gives your chapter the ability to create a personal bond with the reader, granting access to the interior world and culture of your chapter’s daily life. For potential new members on the outside of Greek life looking in, this kind of behind-the-scenes look into life in your chapter can be invaluable, and even inspire them to rush.
The bonus is that running a weekly—or daily if you have the time and keep it short—blog can be beneficial to your chapter’s membership as well.
A blog is a great way to sharpen and develop one’s writing skills, and as a chapter blog for your sorority, the topics can range dramatically from campus conditions, sorority life, personal challenges, etc.
With a sorority chapter of tens—if not hundreds—of members, you’ve got a great pool of potential authors who can contribute to the blog site, building a digital library of content you can share across your social media channels.
Pro-Tip: When you build your Wordpress website, add an opt-in button for readers to subscribe to a newsletter in exchange for their email (more on this later).
On the topic of social media...
5. Create a Facebook page
Facebook is the most popular and widely used social media platform on the Internet and 68% of all U.S. adults have an account.
Facebook is a great resource to promote your organization precisely because it’s so widely adopted and used. Whether its students organizing study sessions in Facebook groups, recording events on campus on Facebook Live or doing some good ol’ fashioned Facebook stalking of that hot guy in your class, Facebook is pretty ingrained in our lives—young or old.
When you create a Facebook page and invite your sisters and fellow students to like it, it allows your future page posts and updates to show up on their timelines.
The result is that when you post campus events, sisterly pictures, and philanthropic updates on your page’s timeline, they’ll show up in the timelines of your followers—ultimately increasing your message’s visibility.
4. Promote your chapter’s brand on Instagram
Instagram—owned by Facebook—is the most popular social media app among millennials, and for good reason. With its focus on images and videos, the app is perfect for timeline scrolling, opting to look at beautiful pictures and funny videos, rather than walls of text.
As a result, it’s the perfect app for your sorority to promote the wellbeing and achievements of your chapter.
Here are a few examples of what you can promote:
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Member achievements
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Scholarships, internships, graduations, athletic success, contests won, etc.
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Chapter achievements
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Scholarships, awards won, new member intake, rush photos, sisterhood fellowships, events, and other programming
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Brand values
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Feel good pictures between sisters, philanthropic acts, photos in the library, etc.
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Flyers and national events
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National Pi Day, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, etc.
Lastly, the final social media tool is...
3. Announce your sorority events on Twitter
Since its inception, Twitter has been in a league of its own.
A text-based social media app by nature, it’s given users the unique ability to eliminate most of the noise that comes from photos and videos (Instagram and Facebook) and instead focus on short messages.
As a result, it’s forced its users to get to the point quickly when speaking, and look for the most important details when reading.
This combination of factors makes Twitter the dominant media platform for delivering announcements and definitive statements, so use it to your advantage.
When advertising your organization’s programming, keep your messages concise and to the point. Twitter allows for images and video, but try to limit your share of media to flyer images and short videos onsite at events.
If your followers wanted a wall of photos and videos, they wouldn’t be on Twitter.
2. Get into email marketing with MailChimp
Mailchimp is a free emailing service that allows you to send up to 2,000 contacts, up to 12,000 emails every month.
If you’ve built a newsletter subscriber function into your blog site, you’ll be able to generate an email list from your readership.
Here’s why that’s important:
You can email these readers whatever you want.
Want to email your reading list a full calendar of the semester’s events?
You can do it.
Want to remind your reading list when Rush will begin?
You can do it.
Want to encourage philanthropic donation to a charity you’re working with?
You can do that, too.
By building an ongoing connection with your readership through email, you’ll gain access to a following you can reach out to whenever you want. An audience for promoting your events, brand, and initiatives to inspire engagement.
1. Hit the Streets with Fiverr
Moving away from the digital side of things, what happens when you need to promote your organization the old-fashioned way? What happens when you need to put some feet on the pavement and tell people in person about your event or your sorority itself?
You can hire Fiverr.
Well, maybe not for telling people about your sorority, but just about everything else.
Fiverr is essentially a low-cost freelance gig website. The gimmick is that every service available costs around $5 dollars and the options for service are vast, to say the least.
So, how would you use Fiverr?
Let’s say you wanted to promote a charity bake sale at the student union two weeks from today.
You’ve got the idea set, but you need a flyer to promote it.
You can find a graphic designer on Fiverr.
Okay, now that the flyer’s been designed, what about printing?
You can have the flyer printed on Fiverr and shipped to you.
Great! But that still means someone will have to get out and po—
Someone on Fiverr can print your flyers and post them around your campus.
And that’s the power of Fiverr. It takes the stress out of filling the gaps between missing resources and instead brings you a local solution for a criminally cheap cost.
Promoting your chapter may require a bit of foresight, but it isn’t hard. In fact, many of the tools available to promote your organization’s events, members, and brand are free; all you have to pick them up and start sharing your achievements.
If you’d like to learn more about OmegaFi and how we can help with your chapter’s recruiting
Call 1.800.276.6342 or Contact us directly here.
