What’s the #1 rea­son to go greek? The social life! Sure they are also great for aca­d­e­mics and phil­an­thropy, but let’s be hon­est, most of those events end in par­ties. The greeks are still the best when it comes to fill­ing a base­ment with fresh­man or crawl­ing the bars, but what about online? I don’t know if I’ve ever run across an appeal­ing or coher­ent national web­site for a greek orga­ni­za­tion.Most of the national sites are ugly and/or bro­ken and serve no pur­pose for any of their active mem­bers. Then, they take it a step fur­ther by rely­ing on each chap­ter to cre­ate their own web­site usu­ally hosted by the chapter’s uni­ver­sity. The chap­ter web­sites regur­gi­tate the same con­tent as the national web­site ( val­ues, tra­di­tion, events, become a mem­ber, etc.). What’s the point? The national web­site can never keep track of proper links to chap­ter web­sites, and chap­ter web­sites are always out­dated mak­ing them use­less infor­ma­tion tools.

If you’re unfa­mil­iar with greek life, they run much like a polit­i­cal party. They recruit new mem­bers, show them a good time for 4 years, then con­tin­u­ally ask for money so that they can con­tinue to recruit new members.

These greek orga­ni­za­tions need to take a look at the mar­vels of social net­work­ing for guid­ance as to how to orga­nize them­selves online. I’m not talk­ing about cre­at­ing a Face­book page or LinkedIn group, but actu­ally struc­tur­ing their national site like a social net­work. Barack Obama’s online com­mu­nity is a per­fect exam­ple of how you can make local orga­niz­ing easy while main­tain­ing a national data­base of mem­bers. His my.barackobama.com is bro­ken down by state so that vot­ers can keep track of his national cam­paign while also see­ing what’s going on in their state.

That same sort of sys­tem could con­nect local chap­ters to their national office and vice versa. There would be no need to repub­lish basic facts like the tra­di­tion and his­tory by each chap­ter. Events could be orga­nized nation­ally and locally. Poten­tial new mem­bers can view every­thing about an orga­ni­za­tion in one place. They could even con­nect with alumni in their area before leav­ing for col­lege (yes greek recruit­ment starts before fresh­man move-in just like col­lege sports). The sin­gle most requested item when­ever I designed a greek web­site was pic­tures. Now they would all be in one place with the abil­ity to make pub­lic or private.

The beauty of a sys­tem like this is its scal­a­bil­ity. Remem­ber how quickly Face­book spread from cam­pus to cam­pus and then to high schools and cities? Same con­cept. If a new chap­ter is founded, it has a brand new web­site set up instantly. Bet­ter still, the organization’s brand­ing is main­tained effort­lessly! If some­one (myself if I had the time and resources) could pack­age a greek spe­cific social net­work plat­form like Ning, they could go to each greek national orga­ni­za­tion and sell them the exact same prod­uct with­out any of the other orga­ni­za­tions know­ing it.

Here are a few exam­ples of cur­rent national greek websites:

Pretty pathetic, huh? The guy in the DTD shirt isn’t even a delt! I know him from HS, guess he’s devel­op­ing an act­ing career.