Working with the GreekXperience has provided our university the opportunity to provide a more meaningful recruitment experience for our Interfraternity Council (IFC) men. Florida International University (FIU) is a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) located in Miami, FL thus the student body consists of a very diverse group of students. Offering a recruitment tool that can assist in guiding the process of finding a fraternal home is something that is needed because many of our students are either immigrant, first or second generation that is the first to go to college in their families and are not familiar with fraternity and sorority culture and tradition.
GreekXperience brings the chapters and the Potential New Members (PNMs) together in a way that is fraternal values-based coupled with the intentional chapter outcomes in mind to recruit individuals that possess similar characteristics and values. The Chapters self-rank according to set chapter values and the PNMs concurrently self-rank the values they believe are strongest within themselves. This data is then used to match individuals with the chapters they seem to have the most in common with. The beauty of this tool, however, is that it does not remove the human experience from recruitment. The PNM and the Chapter are still responsible for reaching out to each other. At the end of the day, there has been a connection between the student and the chapter to ensure a bid and a bid acceptance. What makes this tool even better is that it creates a pathway to brotherhood for men who would otherwise be clueless about fraternities and gives them a place to start their search as opposed to just being bombarded with flyers, letters, colors, and symbols that may be difficult to decipher is one is not already enthralled in the community.
From the administrative side, the tool has the ability to generate reports on recruitment data, bid offers, and bid acceptances that facilitate the tracking process for Fraternity Sorority Administrators (FSA) with the click of a button. As the FSA leading the effort with our IFC at FIU, overall it has been an eye-opening experience with this tool as our recruitment numbers have been its highest in the history of fraternity recruitment with close to 700 men registered. At an HSI with a very high urban commuter population, this number is absolutely astounding. I am very excited to see how the tool further develops and how we can continue to use it in future recruitment efforts.
