Last week, the University of Alabama’s Alpha Phi sorority received widespread attention—first positive, then negative—for a slickly produced video of their sisters living their best lives on campus. How did we get here, to a point where sorority recruitment videos, created to boost interest in a particular chapter on a particular campus, have become a viral internet phenomenon akin to “Call Me Maybe” parody videos?
As recently as a few years ago, the public sorority recruitment video as we now know it did not exist. But they have precursors: in the ‘90s, as one former sorority sister recalls, college Panhellenic councils put out VHS tapes that you could request before you arrived on campus if you really wanted to know how recruitment works. Those types of videos still exist, and are still put out by the Panhellenic councils of the colleges. But they’re created to explain the entire Greek system, not to promote a particular sorority.
Take this one, found at random, from Illinois Wesleyan University.
Videos like these focus on the positive, friendly aspects of Greek life: how—as is commonly stressed—sororities and frats teach leadership skills, and provide “a network of support throughout your undergraduate experience and beyond.” They’re set to uplifting pop songs (often remixes, presumably because of copyright issues), and feature women wearing the letters of their chosen sorority with pride. There are fraternity equivalents, some featuring the Greek councils as an umbrella, produced officially at various schools. But videos made specifically for potential sorority sisters are slightly different from these general, rah-rah Greek life ones. At some schools, as a former sorority sister who was in college in the mid-2000s remembers it, sororities use these videos as internal advertising, screening them for rushees that made it past the initial few rounds of recruitment. Rush begins with the rushees trying to attract the attention of sororities; around halfway, it switches, and the sororities try to attract you. “We made the video to try to complement an image of the sorority girls being super busy and super cool,” said the former member; there’d be footage of the sisters doing charity work, playing sports, performing, followed by a slideshow set to music showing a ten-minute stretch of party pics.These videos were all relatively private, though, in that only women invited to the house saw them. They are essentially tamer versions of the videos the sororities themselves have started putting out—but only in the past few years. How did this formerly private way to convincing women to join your cool club become public? More importantly: why publicize them? As Alpha Phi’s viral recruitment video shows, the appeal of these videos may not just be limited but the potential backlash enormous—and maybe even inevitable.
The biggest impetus for this change is clearly the advent of YouTube, in 2006, and the proliferation of cheap video editing software, both of which allowed anyone to fire up a MacBook and easily cut together a pretty decent looking video that could be uploaded in minutes and kept there for easy reference. And then, on a larger level, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr have given sororities new platforms to promote their brands and make it clear to potential sisters what they’re all about. They’ve also upped the competitiveness between these groups in a more public forum, and made it very clear to fraternities how attractive they are, who often become an important deciding factor in whether a chapter is cool or not. (In a meta turn of events, fraternities have also started taking it upon themselves to parody these videos, and their parodies have gone viral.)
At Sorority Stylista last year, Taylor Sullivan wrote a post encouraging sorority members to use videos to make themselves stand out:
When I went through recruitment, every sorority had the same type of idea. From the color coordinated outfits to the poster boards that show what the sorority does around campus, it’s obvious that ideas are going to fall short eventually. Over the past couple years, the big thing to do is making a recruitment video to show during one of the rounds. It’s a great way to show the PNMs what your sorority is like and it’s also a fun way for your chapter to bond in the process of making the video.
And to really stand out, the details matter, as explained by Stephanie Petit on College Candy. “The songs on your recruitment video need to be sweet and feel good, but the last thing you want it to have the same songs as every other house. Seriously, these girls can only hear ‘I Love It’ by Icona Pop and Phillip Phillip’s ‘Home’ so many times.”
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