All you really care about is how many from each chapter attended. You don't really care WHO attended from each chapter, right?Elegant, eh? Neat, easy to do, no interference, and encourages attendance. What do you think about the suggestion?
As each person arrives for the event, give him or her a ticket. You can buy huge rolls of these at any office supply place for next to nothing. People need to be in the room by the start time of the program to get a ticket. Use a different color ticket for each event.
Then, when the program is over and people are leaving the auditorium, they deposit their tickets in large envelopes, boxes, or other containers decorated with their letters. All the Delta Gamma's drop their tickets in the DG envelope. All the Sig Ep's drop there's in the Sigma Phi Epsilon envelope. It takes mere seconds.
Then, you close up the envelopes, and count up the tickets. Do it right then, or do it the next morning. Whatever.
But what if they bring non-members to the program and these individuals drop their tickets to artificially boost the chapter's attendance number? Well, I think that's a good thing. Encouraging chapters to bring guests is a great way to provide some positive PR to your Greek community (particularly if your speaker is really good). Maybe they'll even bring young men or women whom they are trying to recruit. Hooray!
The Apathy Myth: Tickets for attendance
PS: We are adding this blog resource to the "Not SigEp but not bad" section.
