Let me ask you something: “Are you busy, or are you intentional?”

In recruitment/intake, those two things can look identical from the outside. You can have a packed calendar, a full pipeline of potential sisters, brothers, and siblings, event after event, and still be completely misaligned with the kind of organization you are trying to build. Busyness without direction is just noise. And noise never builds a culture.

At Phired Up, we do not teach that people join organizations. We teach that people join people. That one shift changes everything about how you approach recruitment/intake.

Your potential sisters, brothers, and siblings are not evaluating your letters or your reputation on paper. They are evaluating you. The member who looked them in the eye. The chapter that made them feel like they belonged before they ever signed a bid card. Your members are your recruitment/intake plan. Their authenticity, their relationships, their ability to connect is what brings the right potential siblings through the door and keeps them there.

Before you plan a single event, get honest about who you actually are. Ask your chapter: who are the members that embody what we stand for and what do they have in common? Of your recent new members, who thrived and who faded? If you had 60 seconds to describe your ideal potential sibling, not their GPA but who they are, what would you say? Your answers are your values inventory and your north star for every recruitment/intake decision you make.

Most chapters plan their events first and try to fit values messaging in around the edges. That gives you a full calendar and a misaligned chapter. Instead, start with your values and ask what experiences will naturally attract potential sisters, brothers, and siblings who share them. If you value service, your recruitment/intake events should feel like service. If you value excellence, every detail of your process should reflect it. For each event ask yourself: does this give potential siblings a real window into who we actually are, and would they understand our values if this were the only thing they attended?

Phired Up research is clear: the number one reason someone joins an organization is a personal connection with a member. Not the events. Not the reputation. A real relationship. Train your members to ask open-ended questions and actually listen, share their own story honestly, and follow up personally by name with something specific they remember. If your members cannot talk about your values in a casual conversation, that is data telling you the values work is not done yet.

When a potential sibling shows interest, slow down. Your job is not to convince them to join. It is to discern whether this is a mutual fit. Ask them what they are hoping to get out of this experience, what community means to them, and what would make them walk away from an organization even a good one. Their answers tell you everything. And your honest answers tell them everything they need to know about you.

After every recruitment/intake cycle, ask not just how many people you got but how aligned they are. Look at your new members six months in. Are they engaged or just present? Are they contributing to the culture you are building? A smaller, deeply aligned chapter will outperform a large, misaligned one every single time. Track retention. Track culture. Let those be your success metrics.

You are not just building a roster. You are building a legacy. And people join people, so be exactly who you want them to join.

Written by Dr. Colleen Coffey-Melchiorre, Growth Consultant