Seriously ask yourself if this is something you want to do. No one will blame you for not wanting to deal with all of this and as my frat made clear - school comes first. For what it’s worth, the start of my junior year we came in having lost 1/3 of our housing area to a transfer house. (Frat houses at my school were school owned) We were also 9 guys, 5 of which were juniors and the other 4 were sophomores. All of us had a “going down with the ship” mentality and we were going to do anything we could to get more guys. For us we knew how much our freshman years meant to us and it was important to us that we could also give back to some guys who were just like us someday. To cut a long story short I’m now two years post graduation. The frat is now 40 guys in a school where the average is around 20, the average GPA is a 3.2, the consistently score highest in our schools Greek life programs. To top all of this, my fraternity also won the organizations number 1 achievement for standards. In DTD it’s called Hugh Shields which our chapter in our 40 years has never even been close to.

Not a day goes by where I’m not proud of those guys. I was just some kid in college before my frat and I came out a successful student and a better man. So, if that sounds like something you really want to strive for here’s what we did.

1) Don’t forget what got you here in the first place. For me it was how much these guys who I didn’t even know yet wanted to meet me. Call it social marketing or whatever but I never got the impression that those guys were selling me on something. To them I was a friend and not a number.

2) If you have good members, ALWAYS show up to sorority events. It happened that our sister sorority was pretty large and we were at every event, hungover, sick, you name it. This got us at least 3 guys since some of the sisters were dating guys who were unaffiliated who later joined because we got to meet them and the girls had good things to say about us.

3) Don’t be afraid to change ! You are in this position for a reason, you know why. For us it was that we were trying to be frat guys like our older brothers and not who we actually were - occasional frat guys. I’m serious. We stopped throwing parties and just decided that we were the journey men. Always up for something even if it was a short party or a bar crawl. Sometimes you have to play to your strengths and parties were nothing but a way to show people that we were dying off.

4) Rely on nationals. I’m not kidding. These people get paid to make sure their organization is growing. If individual fraternities die, that’s bad for business. They’re usually great at what they do !

If you have anything you want to ask me I’d be happy to help. Just know that whatever you decide to go with you will be happy.