Dear Brothers and Friends,

Since our founding, SigEp has been a place for young men to develop the leadership and interpersonal skills essential to lifelong personal and professional success. As higher education and the Greek world evolves, SigEp remains committed to being different and innovative in our efforts to build those critical skills.

Today, we’re engaging the professional expertise of those at the cutting edge of higher education. With their help, we’re establishing meaningful and lasting partnerships that will ensure higher quality and more frequent programming and support for our young brothers.

Partnership with our host universities can happen on every level of our Fraternity. For our chapters, this means engaging individual professors to offer academic guidance, speak on important events or issues, or even teach a course. It may also mean soliciting the support of university staff and departments committed to providing important orientation, career, diversity, and health resources or services so that brothers get the most out of their college experience.

At the national level, we are involving campus administrators in strategic planning and campus-specific efforts to elevate the quality of the SigEp experience as well as the experiences provided by our peers in the Greek community. In response to undergraduate appeals and a Conclave vote, SigEp’s National Board of Directors added two higher education professionals to our Board: Victor Wilson, Georgia Renaissance, vice president of student affairs at the University of Georgia, and Cindi Love, executive director of the American College Personnel Association.

We also invited a panel of eight university administrators to offer feedback and suggestions at our National Board’s fall 2015 meeting. Our guests provided invaluable input that is already shaping our programs and service model for chapters. While they applauded our partnership approach, they also challenged us to do more at the campus level with university personnel to support our chapters and each brother who wears SigEp letters.

Providing the best experience

The Balanced Man Program is the core of each brother’s SigEp experience. The personal growth the program provides runs parallel to the goals of our host institutions, making our partnership all the more natural.

At this year’s Carlson Leadership Academies, we revealed a tool that will significantly enhance every chapter’s ability to implement the Balanced ManProgram: the BMP App. This new app is designed to provide an engaging platform for brothers and chapter officers to manage their programming and activities, customize the structure of their BMP and take ownership of their personal development. It will also help reduce the loss of institutional wisdom and resources following annual officer transitions.

At Carlson, we also implemented updates to our officer track curriculum to help chapter leaders address real-world problems many are facing in a changing collegiate environment. The new curriculum is more experiential and seeks to equip officers with the skills and perspective required to address complicated leadership scenarios. Improvements were made based on suggestions from university partners and the guidance of our new director of undergraduate programming and university partnership, Meghan Grace. This updated curriculum— coupled with our new officer guides and improved election and transition resources—will set our chapter leaders up for the sustained success upon which our Fraternity depends.

During lunch at Carlson, Managing Director Seth Irby, Louisiana State ’11, and I engaged undergraduate brothers in an honest discussion about the state of fraternities today and the real-life challenges facing their chapters. The presentation, entitled “The SigEp Leadership Dilemma,” has been extraordinarily well received and, more importantly, challenges our brothers to be leaders when it matters most. (You can view the presentation at www.sigep.org/leadership-dilemma.)

Partnership in action

Around the table at SigEp’s December board meeting, our educational partners encouraged us to do more to utilize the university resources already at our chapters’ disposal. This would allow us to magnify our impact at each campus and advance our most pressing initiatives. It would also mean that SigEp leadership would play a greater role in supporting the priorities of our host institutions.

One important way for our chapters to better engage their campus resources is through faculty fellow involvement. Buchanan Cup-winning chapters havefaculty fellows who are willing to meet regularly with undergraduate brothers to discuss their classes and encourage their academic interests. They are also heavily involved with the chapter’s development program, and he or she may even have office space in the chapter house.

A well-kept chapter house that is conducive to academic success and personal growth can have an extraordinary impact on undergraduate men. Our educational partners have applauded the RLC program as a model of true partnership and an environment that fosters student success.

Our campus partners also reassured us that the desired outcomes of our regional EDGE programs (for new member orientation) align with many of their most important priorities: values-based decision-making, student safety, sexual assault prevention, academic success and career preparedness. However, they encouraged us to re-evaluate the practical application of our EDGE program, which was initially launched more than 15 years ago.

New member orientation is a critical part of our brothers’ SigEp experience. Providing a solid foundation for our new brothers is complex, and we have been trying to accomplish too much in a short amount of time. We need to utilize the resources that exist on campuses across the country to provide the best new member experience and elevate the level of conversation occurring within our Greek communities. If we are able to develop lasting partnerships that engage the resources that already exist on campus, we can positively influence our communities, which, in turn influence our chapters.

After the decision to discontinue our EDGE program this past semester, we have been working to replace this experience with one that engages our campus partners, better meets the needs of our newest members, and sets them up for a lifetime of success as a SigEp brother.

Closing the gap

By nearly all measures, SigEp is the leader in the fraternity world. Our 3.18 average member GPA … our 68-man average chapter size … and our more than 15,500 undergraduate brothers put SigEp at or near the top in every single competitive metric. The personal development, leadership and educational opportunities that we provide are unparalleled among
fraternities.

Still, we are lagging behind our peers in one important area: fundraising. Despite our growth in recent years, we remain far too reliant upon undergraduate fees to fund vital programs, services and scholarships.

The size of our endowment ranks seventh among fraternities—almost a
quarter the size of the leader. And less than 2 percent of our alumni donate to the Sigma Phi Epsilon Educational Foundation, the financial vehicle that makes all of our programs possible. These statistics will need to change in order for SigEp to achieve its vision of being the premier student organization in America.

Like we have at so many other points in our history, SigEp will step up to any challenge put in its path and overcome any obstacle. Our commitment to excellence will ensure undergraduate brothers grow in Virtue, Diligence, and Brotherly Love, and that they will be leaders on every campus where there is a SigEp chapter.