5 Easy Team-Building Activities For Tight Knit Frats and Sororities
Making everyone feel at home in a Greek house is no easy task. Dealing with college students with varying personalities and backgrounds? Definitely not a walk in the park. But as challenging as it is, planning fun team-building events that will bring your members together is key to having a fulfilling Greek life experience. It’s non-negotiable. Make that happen with the help of these five team-building ideas for your chapter.
1. A Special Day Off Campus
After a long week of school, no one wants anything more than some relaxing fun. Have a special day off campus! Go to a sporting event. Have a rooftop brunch. Rent out a movie theater for a night!
It’s all about the little things. Make your members strike up a conversation with one another. Going out for an event? Try carpooling! Plan out who sits beside whom, and pair up unlikely and unexpected groups. These ideas may not look like they'd do much, but you’ll be surprised how they can work wonders.
Wanna make your special days off campus more fun? Get custom shirts and other merch as mementos. On that end, we got you covered.
2. Retreat
This is one of the tried-and-tested team-building activities for fraternities and sororities. Many houses schedule retreats to create a bond among their new and existing members. It could be a full day or just a night blocked off strictly for brotherhood or sisterhood activities.
You can practically hold a retreat anywhere. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Your Greek house or a location off campus will do! But if you wanna go all out, beach or mountain retreats will surely be a hit!
Here are a few things to remember when planning a retreat:
- Consider a fun theme!
- Cater some good food.
- Prepare some fun icebreakers and games.
- Create moments where members can share their stories and talk about their feelings.
Participating may feel awkward at first, but playing fun (or silly!) games can ease your members to open up to their peers and slowly form connections. Don’t forget to have custom retreat t-shirts designed to remember the day! This could bring your chapter together, too! Here are some popular retreat designs you can make your own.
3. Service Projects
Although it is not talked about a lot, sororities and fraternities are big on philanthropy. Working on charitable projects together is a great way of fostering teamwork and camaraderie while doing something good for the community.
At Fresh Prints, we receive a lot of fundraising orders for philanthropy events. In 2021, Alpha Pi Beta Phi raised over $9000 by selling custom apparel! Shirt just got crazy, indeed! Anyway, if you’re planning on doing fundraising through merch, we have just the right team and systems to help you out.
4. Speed Dating
If your new members struggle to name who’s who, this might be the activity for your chapter. It’s pretty simple!
Let your members select a partner and give them around 5 minutes to interact and get to know each other. When the time’s up, have them switch partners, and so on. This will force everyone to talk, and keeping the conversations short might help with the potential awkwardness. When thinking of conversation starters, remember the 5 Fs:
- Friends
- Have you met any good friends on campus yet?
- Which F.R.I.E.N.D.S character are you?
- Suggest a cool place on campus where you and your friends hang out.
- Family
- Is this your first time away from home?
- Were your parents in a fraternity or sorority too?
- Firsts
- How was your first week of classes?
- What is your major? Is it your first choice?
- From
- Where are you from?
- What is it like growing up in…
- What high school did you go to?
- Favorites
- Sports
- TV Shows
- Vacations
- Movies
- Activities
Going into deeper conversations? Here are more convo starters you can use.
To make things more fun, you can make an official event out of it. Have a theme, go crazy, and invite your members to dress up! The goal is at the end of the session, everybody should know everybody!
5. Pledge Class Scramble
Cliques and groups within a chapter are inevitable. I guess birds of the same feather really flock together. This is one of the easiest team-building activities for pledges.
Mix up classes and have younger members get to know older members and vice versa. Setting up a class so that nobody is seated beside someone from their original group could also help. At some point, they’d have to talk and spark conversations. Their potential best friends could just be from another pledge class. Who knows!
These are only 5 of the many team-building activities you can do to improve the bond of your frat or sorority. If you’ve done these before and are looking for other ideas, survey the house, and create a contest around it! Your members just might have a brilliant idea that could bring you all closer together.