We had great success with our collaborative philanthropy week with the Theta Xi chapter of Sigma Nu that ran from October 25th through the 28th. In late July of this year, the programming committee of our chapter proposed the idea of having a haunted house type-event. To do such an event, we knew we’d need an appropriate space + a great amount of support to coordinate everything with it. The idea was proposed to have a talk with SigNu, as they had previously hosted a haunted house event pre-pandemic. Having a meeting between their exec board and ours, we came to terms on what our involvement would be, and what all would be tied to the haunted house activities. Titled “A Nightmare on Progress Street”, we got to work on planning out the finer details of the event.
Members of our chapter’s “haunted house committee” went to the Sigma Nu chapter house at 401 Progress Street in Blacksburg every Monday between the end of August and the end of October to meet and discuss planning and progress with the philanthropy week. Brothers worked to get flyers made and printed, while significant efforts were made to reach out to various external organizations at Virginia Tech, in hopes that they would formally participate in the philanthropy week. Formal participation is when an organization (ex. A sorority) agrees to participate in your philanthropy week, which becomes a competition between other formally participating organizations to raise money through a variety of activities, such as the t-shirt sales, buying tickets to attend the haunted house, etc.
We had 10 different sororities agree to formally participate, which ended up being 9 after one had to back out due to scheduling issues. With over 1,000 girls collectively between these different organizations, we knew we had our work cut out for ourselves to get them hyped up for the week. As a means to help get our new brothers engaged in chapter activities and to also teach them the ways in which they can run a successful philanthropy week, we made a strong effort to get our new guys involved as much as possible. They took on a variety of roles to help out with the philanthropy week, such as helping sell concessions, handling “crowd control” as lines of guests often spiraled around the house’s backyard, amongst other activities.
In total, the philanthropy week was a great success. Hundreds of people attended the haunted house, over $12k was raised for our two philanthropic causes, and over 400 t-shirts were pre-sold for the event. It was a great time for all involved, and we look forward to this Spring 2022’s Flex Out Hunger philanthropy week.