Longwood's Chapter Excellence Program

When I first held an executive council position in my chapter one of the things I least liked was something called "Requalification". I did not know it at first but I quickly learned this was the program (that had been established years ago)that Longwood's Greek Office used to evaluate all chapters on campus. However this was not a very good program because of the requirements set and jsut various reasons it was out of date or out of reach for our campus.

Last spring semester I was on a committee to rework our "requal" program and in that committee the name was changed to the chapter excellence program. We looked at several other campuses who had similiar greek communities to ours and created our own program that all chapters would have a fair chance to earn their rank. The basis of our chapter excellence program is:

Ritual- Pledge service, initiation, officer installation, collegiate to alumna ceremony, ritual review, alumni participation, and ritual equipment upkeep

Scholarship- Established scholarship plan, scholarship incentive programs, scholarship banquet, and monies devoted to improving scholarship

Community Service/ Philanthropy- Service hours, Philanthropic events attended, money donated

Leadership- International convention attendance, LEADERSHAPE attendance, officer tranistion program, chapter goals

Growth/Recruitment/Retention- New member plan, recruitment plans, recruitment functions, recruitment budget, programs geared toward new/current/senior members

Chapter Standards/ Membership Accountability- Standards board, code of standards, risk management, risk management programs and workshops, chapter meeting minutes,

Finances- properly prepared budget information

External Relations- Overall chapter participation, communication with alumni, alumni event participation, Listserv for alumni, communication with parents, Gamma Lambda website

Brotherhood/Sisterhood- chapter programs with outside presenters, activities recognition system, sisterhood events

Housing- established house rules

Each of the bolded headings above are given a points value between 5 and 6 points and the completion of each of the activites within that section determine what point value the chapter recieves. Then the points are added up and the chapters score out of 60 total points give the percentage, therefore creating chapter excellence determined on a percentage scale.

I am not positive because I am no longer in the position on the panhellenic chapter excellence committee but the goal in the beginning was to then deem chapters either gold, silver, bronze, etc. depending on their over percentage after the chapter excellence form is completed.

Open Houses

In order to recruit girls for Alpha Gam here at Longwood, we have various open houses throughout the year. The Continuing Open Bid Coordinator is in charge of planning these open houses. We hang up flyers all around campus to let non Greek girls know that we will be having a get together in our chapter room, and that we would love for them to come and stop by and meet all of our sisters. We always have fun music playing, snacks for them to munch on, and a few interactive games for us to play while we are getting to know one another. When the weather gets warm we usually have our open houses outside of the sorority dorm where we can grill out, play music, and socialize with the girls who come by. This helps us get to know some people before actual recruitment starts. What are some functions that your chapter puts on in order to help recruit for the following year? Let us know what you think about our open houses, or if you have any suggestions of different activities we could do! Thanks for your help!

Spring Weekend Booth

At Longwood every spring semester sometime in April a group on campus called Lancer Productions puts on a huge event with entertainment such as pretty big name artists, other groups on campus, and a ton of booths that organizations can 'rent' and do pretty much whatever they want with. There is also a chili cook off. In the past Gamma Lambda has done the chili cook off and it is such a good time just hanging out with sisters and goofing off, and of course trying to cook something. This year we are looking into also having a booth where we can sell something that will bring in money (without costing too much up front) so that we can donate more to our philanthropy this year. The only idea we have come up with is jewelry that we can make and will hopefully appeal to the women on campus. We were thinking about doing colors of other chapters on campus to appeal to those girls specifically. Hopefully this will be successful but it always hard to tell what people will really spend their money on. Any other ideas of feedback about this idea?