As their beards grew, so did the donations. For the newly clean-shaven brothers of Kappa Sigma at Elon University, No Shave November was a serious endeavor.
The fraternity recently took a strict no-shaving policy to the extreme to visibly demonstrate their fight against prostate cancer, raising more than $20,000 in the process through Movember, an organization that benefits the Prostate Cancer Foundation and LIVESTRONG. For a month, no matter how itchy it may have gotten, being clean shaven was not an option.
All 54 members of the fraternity participated and received more than 300 donations from family members, friends and individuals both in and outside of the Elon community, raising more money than every other undergraduate college team.
They also ranked 38 among all other teams, raising more money than companies like Golf Magazine, General Mills and Bloomberg.
"We're extremely proud of our efforts and we hope we can do more next year," said senior Andrew Springs.
Even though he will be graduating, Springs said he definitely plans to participate next year and donate to Elon's team.
Once a week, each of the Kappa Sigma brothers posted a current picture of themselves on their personal pages on the Movember website so donors could watch their beards get longer.
"I think it's interesting, too, for people who are donating because they can keep going back every week and check the website and see the beard progression," said junior Brian Swaney, who led a similar initiative for the fraternity last year to benefit the Susan G. Komen Foundation.
This year's campaign, which was through an international organization instead of a student-created website that used PayPal to collect donations, roughly quadrupled the amount Kappa Sigma was able to donate.
The team's top contributor, Taggart McLain, raised $4,438, second place among student fundraisers in the United States. Five other brothers ranked in the top 100, Springs said.
"It's definitely something we're going to continue," Swaney said. "We've seen the success of it and it's definitely something unique. We've kind of established it as our event, which is very important in terms of Greek Life on this campus because I feel like each organization has their own main event that they do in terms of philanthropy, and this kind of establishes ours."
Both Swaney and Springs said the cause hits home for most people, since many personally know someone who has been affected by some kind of cancer.
"Cancer is something that we all think about," Springs said. "We're conscious of it but we don't always act on it. So I think joining the fight against cancer, whether it be a donation of $10 or a donation of $1,000, is something that's meaningful to us. We do obviously appreciate every donation and we're very thankful to have achieved our goal, but we know it's not enough until profound fundamental steps are taken in cancer research to eradicate all types of cancer"