About the Project
Download: Midterm Report (July 2024) | Midterm Executive Summary (July 2024)
The full report and comprehensive executive summary will be available in Summer 2025.
Knowing that many members join NPC sororities and decide to terminate their membership for various reasons, this study’s ideal outcome is to better understand the member experiences of undergraduate women to inform retention and engagement strategies.
This project directly supports the women’s research agenda priority of identifying barriers and guiding strategies to increase retention throughout sorority membership.
Insights at a Glance
The insights below reflect the midterm data collected from Fall 2023 to Spring 2024. These insights are likely to change and grow after the research concludes in Spring 2025.
- New members are seeking social connection and belonging from their membership.
Social connection is about people, not parties. Social connection to people — belonging to a group and authentic friendship — is the most valuable and most meaningful benefit new members are seeking in their experience.
- The meaning of membership changes throughout the collegiate experience, and expectations are not always being met.
New members may join for a sense of belonging and desire for connection, but they are eager for leadership opportunities and expectations for career/professional development are not being met.
- New members who join through Continuous Open Bidding (COB) are not so sure about staying until graduation.
COB joiners want to build a social community even more than Primary Recruitment joiners and we are not meeting expectations to integrate them into the chapter.
Our Research Partner: Plaid, LLC
Plaid, LLC is an organizational training and development firm dedicated to creating stimulating and thought-provoking learning experiences.
They provide research and data solutions that can be tailored to the interests and needs of each organization and industry. Their solutions are designed to help users make sense of organizations’ data and make thoughtful decisions for the future.
Their research work includes numerous retention projects in the fraternity and sorority space with many industry associations.
Methodology
Quantitative: This longitudinal study follows two cohorts of National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) sorority women — a cohort who joined in Fall 2023 and a cohort who joined in Spring 2024 — through multiple semesters of their membership. Each semester, participants complete one brief pulse survey (~5-10 minutes in length) to assess their sorority experience to date.
| Two Cohorts of New Members | ||
| Cohort A (Joined Fall 2023) | 766 new members opted into the study | Pulse 1 (Fall 2023): 320 respondents Pulse 2 (Spring 2024): 226 respondents Pulse 3 (Fall 2024) Pulse 4 (Spring 2025) |
| Cohort B (Joined Spring 2024) | 661 new members opted into the study | Pulse 1 (Spring 2024): 282 respondents Pulse 2 (Fall 2024) Pulse 3 (Spring 2025) |
About the Participants:
- Represent 20 NPC organizations
- Represent 127 colleges/universities
- Predominantly in the first year of enrollment with some (<10%) in second year
- Includes joiners through primary recruitment, COB and founding members
Project Timeline
Resources
If you reference any data from this project, please use the following citation:
New Member Longitudinal Study by Plaid, LLC, funded through the Amplifying Sorority Campaign.
Community Resources
- Midterm Report
- The full report will be available in Summer 2025.
- Midterm Executive Summary
- The comprehensive executive summary will be available in Summer 2025.
- Midterm Community Presentation Recording
- A full report presentation will be held in Summer 2025.
- Fall 2023 Cohort, Pulse 1 report
- Fall 2023 Cohort, Pulse 2 report
- Spring 2024 Cohort, Pulse 1 report
