How to Create a Fraternity App for Recruitment

A fraternity app will lend your Greek Life recruitment program a meaningful mobile presence

When you’re responsible for ushering hundreds (or thousands!) of students through the fraternity recruitment process, the one thing constantly on your mind is communication. The channels are too numerous, there are a lot of events to keep up with, and no one seems to have found a way to communicate with everyone at the same time.

Greek Life staff are starting to realize that there is one way to solve all these problems at once – mobile apps. By delivering recruitment communication to students’ mobile devices you can cut paper and eliminate inefficiency. How can you create a fraternity app that works for recruitment?

Choose the right content

Creating a Guidebook guide for Fraternity recruitment means thinking outside of the paper programs you’re used to printing and emails you’re used to sending. As with any app, it’s a matter of asking yourself how the content can work with in the context of mobile – smaller screens, faster consumption, and interactivity.

Tristan Hilpert, Coordinator of Fraternity and Sorority Life at University of Wyoming says, “ All the information is located in one place. It is much easier to update Guidebook compared to our website, so we try and funnel nearly 90% of information to the Guidebook.” With all that information, compartmentalization is key. Here are some fraternity app modules you’ll want to include in your app:

Schedule of Events

A schedule is one of the most difficult things to communicate during recruitment. Create an overall schedule within your app so that students can see what’s happening on any given day, then make use of schedule tracks to tag event to individual chapters.

Social Media

Social media is a great way to bring in some of that immediacy and interactivity to your fraternity app. But of course, your office may be tweeting as well as each individual chapter. With an app you can consolidate all of the streams into one module so that students don’t have to hunt for updates!

Chapter Information

Finally you’ll can solve the problem of not having a singular, central place to display all of the chapter information in a way that’s easy to read. In your fraternity app, simply create a list of the chapters, include photos and a quick summary, call out each chapter’s missions and values, then link to their website. Now students looking to make a decision have a go-to place when trying to make the best choice possible.

Office and Staff Information

It’s always a good idea to make sure that students going through the recruitment process are able to contact your office at any time. Make for a transparent and helpful process by listing out university staff members, their contact information, and your office’s location.

FAQs

Fielding questions from potential new members can be a full-time job in itself.  Hedge a lot of the most common questions with a list of FAQ’s that will easily be accessible during the entire recruitment period. Most questions can then be answered with a simple “check the app!” Including a list of terminology is also common.

Photo Album

Add to the festive, social atmosphere of recruitment by including a shared photo album into your fraternity app. As people continue to upload photos, not only is there a running documentation of the events of recruitment, but also a compelling reason for pledging students to return to the app time after time.

Inbox

Immediate communication is one of the most compelling reasons to create a fraternity app. Push messages immediately to your app users’ home screens and there won’t be a communication emergency when the time of an event is changed or it’s cancelled. Stop waiting for students to check their emails and start messaging them proactively!

Feedback Forms

Remember that a fraternity app will allow you to easily collect information that will help you improve year-over-year. Create a survey so that students who have gone through the recruitment process can let you know what they thought about it and your app.

Ensure adoption

Offering a fraternity app is one thing – but having people download it is another. Just like any other effort, it’s essential to accompany your app with a marketing and communication strategy.

For many schools, the strategy is as simple as making it the primary source of information. If the students involved in your recruitment process know that this is the only way to access the information they’re interested in, naturally they’ll adopt it and use it. It also means that the quality of information within the app is going to determine whether students continue to use it after they initially download it.

Tristan Hilpert from the University of Wyoming has found that communication costs can actually be reduced with a fraternity app. They promote the app with simple cards handed out as opposed to the traditional brochures and fliers. “We also have an all-weather banner that is hung from the Union, which promotes the download of the application. This cuts significant costs that we can reallocate elsewhere.”

Stop sending emails that are never opened, creating Facebook posts that must be promoted to reach your audience, and tweets that get lost in timelines. By centralizing your recruitment communication into a fraternity app, you’ll be providing a better experience and simplifying it in the process!

Start building a fraternity app for recruitment right now with Guidebook. It’s free and we’ve already set up a template to get you rolling.