An easy way to ruin my Sundays was always a long sorority chapter meeting. Regardless of whether I was interrupted studying (and therefore lost my desirable parking spot) or vegging on the couch with my roommates, having to spend an extended period of time voting on purple vs. pink shirts for our next philanthropy events, sloooowly collecting money for the next formal, or whatever announcement it was where all I could focus on was texting my friend — it all took way too much time.
I imagine many of you sympathize — whether you’re a bored sister or a frustrated member of the exec board. You could all use a little less time wasted. Enter in Webgreek.
Webgreek is a platform that makes Greek Life (or really any club) easier. Among the features of the site are dues collecting, event planning, communication (including texting all members or a specific group of members such as live-in members) and textbook rentals.
I spoke to the CEO, Patrick Allen, who came up with the idea with his FIJI fraternity brothers at UC Berkeley.
Just like the girls who founded Her Campus, Patrick was a college entrepreneur (!!).
“We came up with the idea while living in our fraternity house back at UC Berkeley,” he said. “The founders all held executive level positions and the “system” we had paid for was crap. Knowing full well that we could build a better one, we did. We launched in the summer of 2010 and have been growing rapidly ever since.”
My chapter used a similarly bad online website (which I won’t name…) to do these tasks and I found it to be confusing, aesthetically unappealing (unlike WebGreek which is clean and easy to navigate) and also downright annoying.
Unlike that platform — which was genuinely a time waster — Patrick explained that one of the things he has found that the site’s users (who come from 400 chapters!!) appreciate about the site is “the extra time they save using WebGreek.”
Photo: The WebGreek team
“Without spamming, WebGreek sends automatic event reminders to members, but only to the event participants. Chapter exec’s can populate their calendar for the year and never worry about their scheduling again. Other services just send generic group texts to everyone…not cool. File sharing (editor’s note: like sharing music with your sorority sisters!) and general group text messaging gets a ton of usage too,” he said.
This time saving is what got WebGreek HC Approved’s attention. Collegiettes™ are all about saving time — and between Greek life, classes, sports, friends, clubs and applying for internships, we really do not have time to waste at a chapter meeting that could be easily condensed and organized for all members using a host like WebGreek.
This is definitely not saying chapter should be eliminated completely! Chapter definitely facilitates some bonding, sister-sister facetime, and if you’re lucky, Sunday dinner. However using a site like Webgreek to collect money, be reminded of events, vote on things, share files like music or study guides, and communicate will take a lot of the tedious parts of chapter out and leave time for fun!
Check out WebGreek here! And let us know what you think by leaving a comment below!