Philanthropy is a cornerstone of Greek life and we at ChapterBoard always love hearing about the fantastic work our chapters do.
Last month, the Phi Kappa Tau chapter at Chapman University hosted the Orange Community Festival benefiting the Hole in the Wall Camps Association. The Association is an international family of camps and programs that provide support and life-changing experiences to children with serious medical conditions. The camps were originally founded by Paul Newman, a notable member of the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity. Phi Kappa Tau’s festival raised money for a local association camp, The Painted Turtle Camp.
Taking advantage of the beautiful Orange County weather (yes, we’re all jealous up here in Seattle!), Phi Kappa Tau put on a day of “fun” for children and adults that included games, bounce houses, music, raffles, face painting and a walk-a-thon. In addition to inviting the Chapman Greek community and students, Phi Kappa Tau also extended invitations to the Chapman faculty and their families, and the residents of the city of Orange, California.
Suffice it to say, the event was a huge success. Phi Kappa Tau raised over $4,000 from donations and food/ticket sales for the Hole in the Wall Camps Association, and they also encouraged a great relationship between the Greek community and the Orange residents (an important, although often overlooked, relationship to have).
Congratulations to the brothers of Phi Kappa Tau at Chapman! We can’t wait to see how the festival turns out next year… and hopefully some of the ChapterBoard team will be in attendance!
We’re almost to those delicious carefree months of summer, but before we get there we have to celebrate our graduating seniors and all they’ve done! Whether your chapter celebrates with emotional senior send offs, pub crawls or alumni initiations, in the back of our minds we all worry about one thing: will our graduating friends still be involved in the chapter?
For many grads, sadly, that’s not the case, but you as a chapter exec or active collegiate member, can change that! Keep your younger alumni/recent grads involved by, what else, reaching out to them! If you have chapter events that are open to the public, or chapter events specifically for collegians and alumni, go out of your way to invite your alumni back! This means sending emails, creating Evites, texting and calling, and even sending physical invitations in the snail mail (buying stamps suck but guaranteed it’ll get the job done). This also means hosting events tailored to the interests and needs of your alumni. Yes, some of the older alumni might not enjoy a Gossip Girl marathon at the house but keep in mind, when targeting the young alumni, that your young alumni are just that, young! Root beer pong tournament? GLEE-themed karaoke night? Take them down memory lane, remind them why college is so much fun, and encourage them to get and stay involved.
Here are some great programming tips and ideas for engaging young alumni (courtesy of the National Panhellenic Conference):
http://bit.ly/mujAug
One last tip: keep your alumni contact information updated through ChapterBoard! Alumni can use ChapterBoard too (alumni discussions and calendars) and it’s a great way to keep alumni up to date about chapter events, involved in the chapter’s activities, and in contact with collegiate members.
A big CONGRATS to all the 2011 Greek grads! We love our alumni! We’re collegians for four years but we’re Greek forever!
Posted 8 months ago
recent grads, young alumni, alumni involvement, fraternity, sorority, Greeklife, Greek alumni,
Just because it’s officially spring doesn’t mean the ChapterBoard team has been slacking at all! We’ve been hard at work listening to your feedback, integrating your ideas, and tailoring ChapterBoard to the specific needs of the Greek system.
We’re very happy to announce some great new additions and tweaks to the ChapterBoard system. First up, the ChapterBoard Calendars! You can now create events that span multiple days as well as events that repeat at standard intervals. Weekly chapter meetings? Week-long philanthropies? We’ve got you covered!
We also made some important changes to the Polls feature on the Forums. Forum admins and the poll creator can now see who voted for what option in the poll results. When adding a poll, the creator can also hide the results from the chapter so your members can’t see the results. Members still have the ability to see what option they voted for and change it if they like.
As always, a big thank you to all our wonderful ChapterBoard users and specifically those who send in feedback and help us make ChapterBoard better. If you have any ideas, suggestions, or critiques, please email them in!
- the ChapterBoard Team
Thanks to all our users who have been sharing ChapterBoard with their friends in other chapters! In just over 2 months we have reached 600 downloads of our official ChapterBoard app in the iTunes Store. Not only are we getting a lot of downloads, but it looks like everyone is really enjoying the app as well. A 4.5 out of 5 star rating is pretty impressive considering its our first attempt at building a better mobile experience around ChapterBoard.
That said, we know there’s still a lot of work ahead of us. Over the next few months we’ll be working really hard to bring our Android and BlackBerry users a better mobile experience.
Over the course of the past 6 months we’ve gone from just friends of friends using our site, to over 300 chapters nationwide. With that kind of growth we have to be doing something right! (Ya I know, humor us.) Anyways, we want to know from you, just how well our site addresses your chapter’s needs.
So, starting this week you’ll periodically notice a one question survey popup when you are on ChapterBoard. If you have a moment, go ahead and fill it out with your most brutally honest opinions.
Just a quick note to let you guys know that we updated the dashboard so that you see which forums the recent topics belong to. This should help make navigating the forums a bit quicker from your dashboard.
Enjoy!
We love hearing success stories from our chapters. This week we’re spotlighting the Pi Kappa Alpha chapter at Southwestern University for their excellent winter recruitment.
Since implementing ChapterBoard’s recruitment tools this January, their chapter was able to bid 21 new members. That’s more than double their previous year’s and larger than any other fraternity on their campus!
“Also, the recruitment list feature helped us out immensely for spring recruitment—our recruitment program is deferred so we have to keep in contact with guys for an entire semester before we can give them bids, and using the online database helped us stay on top of all the guys we were recruiting. We were able to get a 21 man pledge class, more than double previous years and larger than any other fraternity on campus by a wide margin.” — Brady Kent, Chapter Secretary
Keep up the great work guys!
This site has made our chapter function on a whole new level thanks!
- Thanks Cameron from Morehead State!
Just a short announcement letting everyone know that you can now leave comments on all your favorite photos in the chapter photo galleries. You can also like the comments, just like in the forums (no pun intended!).
Just a quick update to let everyone know that we recently launched some improvements to the ChapterBoard private messaging feature.
We’ve enabled sending messages to groups on ChapterBoard, so if you have a message for all your pledges or exec members it’s much easier to send them a quick note.
In addition, we’ve implemented email replies for private messages just like the forum boards. When you receive an email about a new private message you can simply reply back and your message will get posted for everyone else in the conversation to see.
And last but not least, you can now delete private messages from your inbox. If someone else in the conversation posts a new reply, it will reappear in your inbox as a new message so you don’t miss a thing.
We hope you all enjoy the changes. We also want to thank all our users who gave us the suggestions.
