This year for Homecoming, Iowa SHOUT aims to bring more diversity to its performances.

Iowa SHOUT Director Caleb Smith said SHOUT as a Homecoming event encourages residence halls, student organizations, and fraternity and sorority members to create skits or performances around the Homecoming theme.

At the end, the judges rank the performances, and there is a winner per category.

The winners then receive points that go toward the Homecoming Week events as a whole, in which there is an overall winner.

The idea on campus persists that SHOUT is an exclusively greek event, but that is not the case.

“What we do, all we can do, is explain that we want everyone to try to get involved,” Smith said.

As it is now, students must participate in the event through a residence hall, student organization, or greek life.

However, Smith said he has talked to the adviser for SHOUT and hopes to change that so, in future years, anyone can get a group together and join.

Maria Hall, the residence-hall sweepstakes director, said that while organizers do not have any residence-hall participants in SHOUT this year, they hope to increase their numbers next year by communicating better through their representative meetings and the RAs, so the students understand they can get involved.

While the numbers of residence-hall groups may not have grown, the participation of student organizations has.

One specific change took place this year because of Francis Hart, the student organization sweepstakes director.

He said he reached out to various groups frequently in May, and as an added incentive, if they registered then, they were given 25 points to add to their overall Homecoming Week score this year.

“We have three student organizations involved in SHOUT this year,” Hart said. “Which, I know, doesn’t seem like much, but it’s a definite increase.”

Next year he said he hopes to get even more student organizations involved by emphasizing the ones that were involved this year to show it’s not just greek.

Hart also talked about his goal for all of Homecoming Week, which was to have a 50 percent increase in student-organization involvement across all events and which he accomplished.

“It all relates back to the homecoming theme: ‘Celebrating Iowa — Celebrating as One,’ ” Hart said. “This week is about inclusion. We’re all Hawks, and that’s what this week is all about.”

Hall said the UI adapted events to be more inclusive, such as not requiring four guys and four women for a ruckus team, but instead just asking for eight participants per team.