Pat Daley is author of both the book, The Fraternity Leader, and the website The Fraternity Advisor. He was his university, chapter and national fraternity man of the year in 2000. He was a two year chapter president and was his university’s IFC president. We’re delighted to have him guest blog for us, as his first-hand experience in ensuring fraternities and their members thrive is simply exceptional. We encourage you to check out his book and website to gain a bit of his broad fraternity knowledge!

Buying Your Friends

Clever people who don’t understand what fraternity life is all about often claim that we are buying our friends.  Their logic is pretty sound.  You are paying money to be in a social organization.  So, on the surface it does look like you are buying your friends.

Obviously, that couldn’t be further from the truth.  However, what if you took away that argument?  And if you took away that argument, could your fraternity prosper more than ever before?

Absolutely it could.  First though, you would have to completely change your mindset about fraternity finance.

Since fraternities were started, the idea was to pay dues semester after semester, year after year.  No one likes paying dues, and it a major headache to get some brothers to pay.  Think about how awesome it would be to have a fraternity that didn’t have dues.

If you didn’t have fraternity dues, recruitment would be a million times easier.  That is obviously a huge deterrent of joining for a lot of guys.  If recruitment was easier, you could be more selective with the guys you did extend bids to.  This would improve the quality of your membership, which would have a huge impact on your chapter operations.  Your fraternity would grow at a crazy rate, and it would grow with the highest quality guys.

By now, you probably think I am in a dream land.  I understand there are necessary, evil expenses that every chapter is responsible for.  To pay for these, your chapter should turn to fundraising.

A chapter that is good at fundraising can do incredible things for its membership.  Fortunately, I have created a list of several fundraisers that are very easy and very profitable.  Your chapter can make an easy $10k to $20k a semester by following my advice.

Don’t stop there though.  A leader should be able to come up with a few fantastic fundraising ideas on his own.  Eagerly implement these ideas and reap the fruits of your labor and creativity…

So, are you going to accept the norm and fork over a few hundred bucks a man every semester?  Or are you going to challenge yourself and your membership to become creative enough to fundraise the cash?

I hope you choose the latter, because working for it will make your fraternity experience much richer and more rewarding.