Yelling isn’t the only thing the greek community will be doing like hell for this year’s Homecoming festivities – IT will also be donating like hell.

This will be the first year the Homecoming competitions within the greek community will include a blood drive among the other activities.

“I think that the main difference [that will be seen in this year’s Fall Blood Drive] will be having more donors and it will succeed more with this [merger],” said Ashley Kampen, junior in elementary education and co-director of the 2006 Fall Blood Drive.

Last spring, the 2006 Fall Blood Drive Committee contacted Homecoming Central to organize the merger of the blood drive during Homecoming Week.

“When the blood drive committee came to us we thought it would be a great opportunity to start a new partnership,” said Daniel Determan, junior in hotel, restaurant and institution management and 2006 Homecoming Central general co-chairman. “The overall benefit is that it looks good for ISU as a whole to have two big blood drives [each year].”

Every spring semester the Spring Blood Drive coincides with the greek community’s Greek Week celebration, which turns out more donors than each previous Fall Blood Drive.

“The Fall Blood Drive doesn’t do quite as well as the spring one that is paired with Greek Week,” said Paul Vulcan, sophomore in health and human performance and co-director of the 2006 Fall Blood Drive. “We knew that the greek community is huge in volunteering and takes leadership roles on campus and we wanted to get them involved.”

Points for the greek competition part of blood drive will be awarded differently for Homecoming than they have been for Greek Week.

The Fall Blood Drive will be based on participation, whereas Greek Week is based off of more incentives.

“Since it is the first year, we wanted to keep the point system simple when it comes to Homecoming Central rules,” Determan said. “This Fall Blood Drive is based off of participation.”

Determan said each greek pairing needs to have 30 percent participation to even get participation points. Also, up to 10 percent of the pairing can get participation points through volunteering rather than donating.

“During Greek Week it is more complicated because extra points are awarded if people donate Monday through Wednesday or if they bring a friend,” Determan said. “[This year] basically is about encouraging people to donate.”

The blood drive committee has also worked to encourage participation with nongreeks as well.

“We try to involve nongreeks as much as possible,” Kampen said. “Our committee this year is half non-greek so there are ways we are trying to involve them too.”

Kampen said one way that the committee has tried to increase participation among nongreeks was to ask professors to allow extra credit in classes for donating.

“All students are important to giving blood, greek or not,” Determan said. “Our main mission is to increase student participation because this is something great that ISU takes pride in.”

Both committees said as of now, the Fall Blood Drive will coincide with Homecoming Week in the future.