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 The national website can never keep track of proper links to chapter websites, and chapter websites are always outdated making them useless information tools.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.