FRATERNITY AND SORORITY CRISIS MANAGEMENT PROCEDURES

It is an unfortunate reality that from time to time a serious injury, loss of life, major property loss, or criminal activity will occur in a chapter.

Strong preventive measures will prevent most losses.  Safety inspections, fire drills, the elimination of improper and illegal activities, and liability and risk management seminars are all essential to control risk.

Should any event of a disastrous nature occur, however, the chapter must be prepared to respond quickly and appropriately.

MAINTAINING CONTROL

Be certain that everyone in your chapter knows the president is in command of every emergency situation.  In the absence of the president, you should have a rank ordering of officers (chain of command):

l.  President

2.  _____________________________

3.  _____________________________

If a crisis has occurred at the chapter house, close the house at once.  You cannot give instructions if your members are leaving and strangers are entering.   Permit only members and appropriate officials to enter.   Halt all incoming and outgoing telephone calls, except those of an emergency nature.

In most crisis situations, you will want to call a mandatory chapter meeting, for actives and pledges/associates, as soon as possible.   Make sure your chapter advisor or other member of your alumni advisory board is present. At this meeting:

• Explain the situation and gather facts.
• Project a strong leadership image to let your members know everything is under control so they will remain calm.
• Clarify who is the spokesman (normally the chapter president).  No one else should make statements or answer questions about the situation.
• Instruct members not to discuss the incident with anyone, including boy/girlfriends and family members, until the situation has been resolved.  In the event of a fire or accident, members should, of course, be encouraged to notify their parents to let them know they are okay.

• Detail the plan for the next several days.

• Instruct your members to cooperate with campus or law enforcement officials investigating an incident.

INVESTIGATIONS

Make written notes of all details relating to any incident.  It will be especially important to get the names of all members present, the names and telephone numbers of any witnesses (in some cases you may want to get signed statements from the witnesses), and the names and telephone numbers of anyone injured (however slightly).  Some incidents may result in lawsuits, and if you are called to testify in court months after the incident, the notes will be invaluable.  Share the information you collect with your chapter advisor and any campus or law enforcement officials conducting an investigation. Itemize any property losses, and keep records of any expenses related to the situation.

MEDIA RELATIONS

Again, it is critical that the officially designated chapter spokesperson be the only person to speak with the media.  No exceptions!

Consult with your chapter advisor, the Greek Life Advisor, and your attorney (if applicable) so that they can help you prepare for any media contact.  They can also assist you in developing a prepared statement that can be read to the press.  Prior to the development of a statement the following standby statement should be used (avoid saying “no comment” — it sounds as if you are trying to hide something): “We can confirm that (describe the incident very briefly) occurred on (day) at (time) at (location). The chapter is cooperating with authorities and all interested parties.  Further information will be released when we have completed our investigation of all pertinent matters.”  Absolutely nothing else should be said.  The only response to other questions should be: “When we have completed our investigation, we will release more information.”

Instead of a press briefing, you may elect to simply prepare a statement and distribute it to the media.

When you are being interviewed, tell the truth.  Give only the facts.  If you don’t know an answer to a question, say so.  Don’t speculate or repeat hearsay.   Avoid exaggerations and inflammatory remarks.  Stress what positive action you are taking to resolve the situation.  If you are asked a question you feel is unfair, simply rephrase the question the way you would prefer to have it asked, then answer your question.  Never make “off the record” comments.

Consider your appearance.  Dress neatly (semi-formal).  Your members should also dress neatly even if they are casual (no beer T-shirts, etc.).  Clean up your house, being careful to remove trash, beer bottles, and anything else that may not look favorable in a photograph or on TV.  Consider holding a press briefing away from the chapter house, perhaps at a location on-campus.  Caution your members not to grandstand in the background during TV interviews.

Do not release any names until an investigation is complete and the timing is appropriate.

Don’t discuss the personal life of your members with reporters.

Keep your house locked.  Do not let television cameras or photographers into your house (unless you specifically want to invite them in for a press conference).

MEDICAL EMERGENCIES

Be sure your chapter has a complete first aid kit in an accessible place in your chapter room.  Take the kit with you at chapter retreats and other out-of-town functions.

Call the paramedics and give necessary information regarding the sickness/accident.

In the event of a serious illness or injury, do not notify the parents immediately.  The medical officials will notify parents and advise them of their physical situation.

MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS

In the event of a mental health crisis, for example a suicide threat or attempt, call emergency services as appropriate.  If time permits, arrange for a professional counselor to provide you with assistance. While awaiting the counselor’s arrival, talk with the member involved and provide him reassurance.  Don’t play psychologist–just be a friend and make the person comfortable.

In the event of a mental health crisis, do not assemble your members.  Discuss with campus officials steps you should take to handle the situation.  Campus officials will determine if the parents need to be contacted.

SERIOUS ILLNESS

There are several procedures and precautions that group members should take in the event one of your fellow members develops what appears to be a serious illness (including substance addiction or eating disorder).  An ill member may ignore his or her condition and may not take the initiative to seek proper medical attention.  As responsible adults, you must be sensitive to your members’ physical and psychological welfare.  If you become aware of a member who is suffering from a serious illness, take immediate action by following these guidelines and contacting appropriate people who can help:

• Initially bring your concern to the attention of the member.  Tell the member you are aware of his/her condition and that you are concerned.
• Determine what kind of medical or psychological counseling attention the member has sought.  What kind of care has been described?
• If the ailing individual continues to ignore his/her physical or psychological condition, contact your chapter advisor.  Information about the situation should be brought to the advisor’s attention, and consult the campus counseling center for guidance on establishing a specific plan of action to help the member.

It is extremely important that members be understanding and sensitive in dealing with cases of serious illness.  There may be some cases when a ailing person will not want your assistance and will strongly object to any contact with his parents.  It is important to respect the wishes of the person; however, you may find yourself in a situation where respecting a person’s wishes may not be medically wise or sound.  The realities of the situation should not be ignored.

DEATH

In the event of a death, do not notify the parents; this will be done by emergency or campus officials.

Do not announce the death until your chapter advisor has arrived to help.  You may also want to have a campus counselor present when you make the announcement to help your members deal with the shock.

Be very careful that the death is not announced until all members of the immediate family have been notified.

If the member lived in the house, do not remove any of the deceased student’s personal possessions.  If the member had a roommate, the roommate should be moved temporarily to another room.  You should call the family to offer sympathy on behalf of the chapter, and ask what their wishes are in regard to the possessions.  You may offer to pack them in boxes, but chances are the parents will prefer to do this themselves.  Before they arrive, be sure all borrowed items are returned to the deceased’s room and if possible, lock it.   When they do arrive, you may want to have empty boxes available and offer to help.  This is an emotional trauma for parents and they may not want privacy.

It is of course proper to send sympathy cards and notes, flowers, etc.   If the funeral is nearby, it will mean a great deal to the parents for members to attend.  Offer to make a statement on behalf of the fraternity at the memorial service.

If the funeral will be out-of-town, you probably will want to arrange a local memorial service.  You can contact the campus ministries for assistance in making arrangements.  Check to see if your ritual contains a ceremony for memorial services.

For some of your members, this may be their first experience in dealing with the death of someone close to them.  Keep an eye out for members who appear to be having difficulty coping with the situation and encourage them to talk with a counselor.

Student affairs officials will take care of notifying the deceased student’s instructors and other  campus offices of the death.

When someone close to you dies, it is difficult to accept the loss, and you and your members may find yourselves consumed by pain, fear, and grief.  Grief is a normal response to losing someone who was important to you.  Grief hurts, but it is necessary.  When a death tears your world apart, grieving is the process that puts it back together.

Grief runs thorough stages, although not everyone experiences every stage, and your members will pass through the stages at their own rate.  That is why it is important to understand the stages of grief:

• Denial – This response is nature’s way of protecting you and insulating you from what happened.
• Anger – You may feel angry toward the doctors and nurses who couldn’t save the life of the deceased.  You might even feel angry at the deceased for leaving you.  These feelings of anger may lead you to feel guilty.
• Guilt – You may feel guilty for simply being alive when someone else has died.  You might feel guilty about not saying goodbye, or you may remember a fight you had with the deceased.
• Depression – Even you are normally a committed, caring person, you may find that you don’t care about anything or anyone.  This is a common feeling as are the others.
• Acceptance – Hopefully, the grieving process will accept the death eventually.  That does not mean you have to forget the deceased.  It just means it is time to go on living.

One of the best ways to begin working through grief is to attend the funeral or memorial service.  A funeral confirms the reality of death and serves as a focus for expressing feelings of loss.   You begin to help the family of the deceased, and yourself, by attending the funeral.  Being there demonstrates that although someone has died, friends like you remain, and it demonstrates that you care.  Both before and after the funeral, it is important that you express your feelings.  Crying is both healthy and normal.  It may also help to hold a discussion to help members with accepting the loss.

“The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.” – Henry David Thoreau

Are there a hundred different things you wish you could do with your life someday — anything from exercising to meditation or yoga to writing that novel you always wished you could write to reading more to relaxing and watching the sunrise?

But perhaps you never have the time, like most people.

The truth is, we all have the same amount of time, and it’s finite and in great demand. But some of us have made the time for doing the things we love doing, and others have allowed the constant demands and pressures and responsibilities of life to dictate their days.

It’s time to move from the second group back into the first. Reclaim your time. Create the life you want and make the most of the free time you lay claim to.

It’s not hard, though it does take a little bit of effort and diligence.

Reclaiming that free time

Take my life, for example: there was a time, not too long ago, when my day was packed from morning to night, when I had meetings and long to-do lists and worked long hours and the rest of my time was filled up with social engagements and meetings for civic responsibilities. I had little time for my family, which ate me up, and little time to do the things I’ve always wanted to do.

I’ve always wanted to write, but never had the time. I’ve always wanted to exercise, but was too busy. I always wanted to travel, but who can get away? I’ve always wanted to spend time with my kids, but work comes first, right?

Wrong. I finally got smart and decided that my life is my own, to do with as I wished, and so I took a time out to decide what I really wanted my life to be like. Then I designed my life, and made a series of decisions and steps to get my life to what I wanted it to be.

Today, I wake early and exercise or spend some quiet time reading and writing. I’ve written a novel and a non-fiction book. I write this blog. I run and have finally run a marathon (two actually) and completed a triathlon. I spend afternoons and evenings and all weekends with my kids and wife.

My life is what I’ve always wanted it to be, because I designed it to be that way and worked to make that design come true.

It can be that way for you, to the extent that you’re willing to make changes. Even if you just want to free up a little time for a hobby or for doing something relaxing, you can do that.

20 Ways to Find More Free Time

Not all of these will be applicable to your life — choose the ones you can apply and give them a try:

1. Take a time out. Freeing up your time starts with taking a step back to take a good look at your life. You need to block off at least an hour. Several hours or half a day is better. A whole day would be awesome. A weekend would be even more ideal, though not necessary practical for many folks. With this block of time, take a look at your life with some perspective. Is it what you’ve always wanted? How would you get to where you’ve always wanted to be? What do you enjoy doing, but don’t have enough time to do? What things actually fill up your day? Are there things you could drop or minimize to make more time? We’ll look at some of these things in the following items, but it starts with taking a time out to think and plan.
2. Find your essentials. What is it that you love to do? Make a short list of 4-5 things. These are the things you want to make room for.
3. Find your time-wasters. What do you spend a lot of your time on that isn’t on your essential list? Take a close look at these things and really think about whether they’re necessary, or if there are ways to reduce, minimize or eliminate these things. Sometimes you do things because you assume they’re necessary, but if you give it some thought you can find ways to drop them from your life. Figure out what you do simply to waste time — maybe surfing certain sites, watching TV, talking a lot at the water cooler, etc. You’re going to want to minimize these time-wasters to make room for the more important stuff, the stuff that makes you happy and that you love to do.
4. Schedule the time. As you sit down and think about your life and what you want to do, versus what you actually do, you will be looking at ways to free up time. It’s crucial that you take a blank weekly schedule (you can just write it out on a piece of paper, or use your calendar) and assign blocks for the things you love — the stuff on your essentials list. If you want to exercise, for example, when will you do it? Put the blocks of time on your schedule, and make these blocks the most important appointments of your week. Schedule the rest of your life around these blocks.
5. Consolidate. There are many things you do, scattered throughout your day or your week, that you might be able to consolidate in order to save time. A good example is errands — instead of running one or two a day, do them all in one day to save time and gas. Another example is email, or any kind of communication — batch process your email instead of checking and reading and responding throughout the day. Same thing with meetings, paperwork, anything that you do regularly.
6. Cut out meetings. This isn’t possible for everyone, but in my experience meetings take up a lot of time to get across a little information, or to make easy decisions that could be made via email or phone. As much as you can, minimize the number of meetings you hold and attend. In some cases this might mean talking to your boss and telling her that you have other priorities, and asking to be excused. In other cases this might mean asking the people holding the meeting if you can get the info in other ways. If so, you’ve saved yourself an hour or so per meeting (sometimes more).
7. Declutter your schedule. If you have a heavily packed schedule, full of meetings and errands and tasks and projects and appointments, you’re going to want to weed it out so that it’s not so jam-packed. Find the stuff that’s not so essential and cancel them. Postpone other stuff. Leave big blank spaces in your schedule.
8. Re-think your routine. Often we get stuck in a routine that’s anything but what we really want our days to be like. Is there a better way of doing things? You’re the creator of your life — make a new routine that’s more pleasant, more optimal, more filled with things you love.
9. Cut back on email. I mentioned email in an earlier point above, regarding consolidating, but it’s such a major part of most people’s lives that it deserves special attention. How often do you check email? How much time do you spend composing emails? If you spend a major part of your work day on email, as many people do (and as I once did), you can free up a lot of time by reducing the time you spend in email. Now, this won’t work for everyone, but it can work for many people: choose 2-3 key times during the day to process your inbox to empty, and keep your responses to 5 sentences. (Read more.)
10. Learn to say no. If you say “yes” to every request, you will never have any free time. Get super protective about your time, and say “no” to everything but the essential requests. Here’s how.
11. Keep your list to 3. When you make out your daily to-do list, just list the three Most Important Tasks you want to accomplish today. Don’t make a laundry list of tasks, or you’ll fill up all your free time. By keeping your task list small, but populated only by important tasks, you ensure that you are getting the important stuff done but not overloading yourself.
12. Do your Biggest Rock first. Of the three Most Important Tasks you choose for the day, pick the biggest one, or the one you’re dreading most, and do that first. Otherwise you’ll put that off as much as possible and fill your day with less important things. Don’t allow yourself to check email until that Big Rock is taken care of. It starts your day with a sense of major accomplishment, and leaves you with a lot of free time the rest of the day, because the most important thing is already done.
13. Delegate. If you have subordinates or coworkers who can do a task or project, try to delegate it. Don’t feel like you need to do everything yourself. If necessary, spend a little time training the person to whom you’re delegating the task, but that little time spent training will pay off in a lot of time saved later. Delegating allows you to focus on the core tasks and projects you should be focusing on.
14. Cut out distractions. What is there around your workspace that distracts you from the task at hand? Sometimes it’s visual clutter, or papers lying around that call for your attention and action, or email or IM notifiers on your computer that pop up at the wrong time, or the phone, or coworkers. See if you can eliminate as many of these as possible — the more you can focus, the more effective you’ll be and the less time you’ll waste. That equals time saved for the good stuff.
15. Disconnect. The biggest of distractions, for most people, is the Internet. My most productive times are when I’m disconnected from the grid. Now, I’m not saying you need to be disconnected all the time, but if you really want to be able to effectively complete tasks, disconnect your Internet so you can really focus. Set certain times of the day for connectivity, and only connect during those periods.
16. Outsource. If you can’t delegate, see if you can outsource. With the Internet, we can connect with people from all over the world. I’ve outsourced many things, from small tasks to checking email to legal work to design and editing work and more. That allows me to focus on the things I’m best at, the things I love doing, and saves me a lot of time.
17. Make use of your mornings. I find that mornings are the absolute best times to schedule the things I really want to do. I run, read and write in the mornings — three of the four things on my Essentials List (spending time with family is the other thing on the list). Mornings are great because your day hasn’t been filled with a bunch of unscheduled, demanding, last-minute tasks that will push back those Essentials. For example, if you schedule something for late afternoon, by the time late afternoon rolls around, you might have a dozen other things newly added to your to-do list, and you’ll put off that late-afternoon Essential. Instead, schedule it for the morning, and it’ll rarely (if ever) get pushed back.
18. The Golden Right-after-work Time. Other than mornings, I find the time just after work to be an incredible time for doing Essential things. Exercise, for example, is great in the 5-o’clock hour, as is spending time with family, or doing anything else relaxing.
19. Your evenings. The time before you go to bed is also golden, as it exists every single day, and it’s usually completely yours to schedule. What do you want to do with this time? Read? Spend time with your kids? Work on a hobby you’re passionate about? Take advantage of this time.
20. Lunch breaks. If the three golden times mentioned above don’t work for you, lunch breaks are another good opportunity to schedule things. Some people like to exercise, or to take quiet times, during their lunch breaks. Others use this time to work on an important personal goal or project.

“The real problem of leisure time is how to keep others from using yours.” – Arthur Lacey

First, realize that there are two ways of making money for your organization…

FUNDRAISING and SPONSORSHIP!

some fundraising ideas:
- date auctions: note! girls make MUCH MORE than guys
- garage sales/swap meets: make sure you gather tons of items and maybe even post them online beforehand!
- food! call up a restaurant, tell them you’re going to be bring out a lot of people, and ask them what they can do for you
- jail cell: put up a canopy, rope it off, and arrest people for 50 cents for 10 mins! its fun, its cheap, its easy
- bowl-a-thon
- bike-a-thon
- sell food on campus: make sure it’s okay with the school first!
- go clubbing! ask around some local clubs and see if they can cut your a percentage of the profits they make off of pre-sale tickets
- hold your own dance! doesn’t have to be at a club, maybe you can find a cheaper venue somewhere else!
- casino/poker night! get some businesses to donate prizes/gift certificates as prizes, trade in your poker chips for raffle tickets!

some tips on fundraising:
- always ask around for connections, the more resources you have…the better!
- it’s all about the HYPE! publicize your events well!
- attend other organization’s events, they’ll return the favor and come out to your events!
- plan earlier and stay organized, this ensures success.
- Use all means of promoting! facebook, twitter, myspace, email, texting, calling, do whatever it takes!

now sponsorship is a little different, that’s usually just your organization going around, and asking for money.

surprisingly, it can be pretty successful if you do it right.

also, it’s usually easier to ask for sponsorship for a specific event, such as a fundraiser or a culture night.

ideas & tips for sponsorship:
- know your details well! a lot of people will ask you to explain why you want money
- be professional: act mature and dress nicely
- go everywhere! you won’t know til you try
- ask your friends, family, and relatives
- have a sponsorship packet ready to go!
- offer your sponsors advertising space in your program
- don’t forget to acknowledge and thank you sponsors after the event!
- do sponsorship runs in groups or at least pairs, shows unity and teamwork