Improving Chapter Communication
Does your chapter’s Scribe normally call everyone one-by-one the day of an event? Do you feel that some of your brothers’ best ideas come outside of chapter? If so, your chapter might not be taking advantage of technology available to make your lives easier.
There are many resources your chapter can turn to for improved communications, including: Yahoo! Groups, GIN System, Google Groups and much more. Many of these sites can have your members sign up and create discussion boards and a list serv. Listservs can be a great tool to remind brothers of upcoming events. Most of those services will also have the options to make certain brothers administrators. This way only certain people, like chairs and exec board, can send out listserv emails so it will be taken seriously and brothers can’t send out random emails about nothing. For lengthy discussions we recommend using a message board as no one likes to get 100 emails of brothers bickering in a day.
The chapters that run the most efficiently, usually with the shortest chapter meetings too, use the discussion board for issues that normally drag on and on. Once everyone signs up for whatever service you choose, you simply state in chapter after four to five points of view that it will be discussed further on the message board. A great example is themes for upcoming social events. How many times has your chapter debated on and on with brothers throwing out ridiculous ideas for upcoming events? Well if your chapter uses those services, you social chair can move that discussion to the message board. This way, it’ll give the brothers a whole week to think of good ideas and can potentially save a lot of time from the chapter meeting. Message boards are also great for ongoing topics such as house improvements or formal ideas that may take months to agree on and don’t need to be discussed every week in chapter.
There are even more services that can help with alumni newsletters and networking, like Constant Contact and the Pi Lambda Phi website. We strongly encourage your chapter to explore several options and pick the one right for you. Whether it’s just a listserv or the whole list of services previously mentioned, anything to improve communication amongst brothers and make exec board’s life easier is a worthwhile investment. You can also use mass text messages to give urgent messages or reminders to your brothers. Networktext.com provides a free service to groups looking to use such a personlized system.
Links to services: GIN System (http://www.theginsystem.com) Yahoo! Groups (http://groups.yahoo.com) Google Groups (http://groups.google.com) Constant Contact (http://www.constantcontact.com) Pi Lambda Phi International Fraternity (http://www.pilambdaphi.org) |