Portrait of Easton Raboin (left) and Alan Estrada-Morales (right).
For fraternity members serving as sober drivers, a night out could mean receiving constant phone calls from unknown numbers, keeping track of pickup and drop-off locations and trying to coordinate multiple rides while driving.
Two University of Nebraska-Lincoln students knew there had to be a better way to manage the whole process. Their solution, GreekLifts, is an app designed to organize sober rides for fraternity and sorority members.
The app was developed by Easton Raboin, a sophomore business analytics major, and Alan Estrada-Morales, a junior computer science major. It allows students to request rides through the app while fraternity drivers manage their shifts and incoming ride requests in one place.
Estrada-Morales first came up with the idea during his freshman year of college. He met Raboin in a class last year and shared the idea with him in December 2025 after experiencing a particularly difficult shift as a sober driver for his fraternity, Pi Kappa Alpha.
“I was getting spam called by 20 different people and getting texts from everyone while I was driving,” Estrada-Morales said. “I was like, this is really not safe, and it’s a big issue. There’s gotta be a better way to do this.”
Raboin joined Phi Delta Theta in spring 2026 and encountered similar problems. He said students waiting for rides sometimes became frustrated if they didn’t know when their driver would arrive.
“There were literally people telling me the f-word, like, ‘What are you doing?’ and ‘Why are you not at my place?’” Raboin said.
Before GreekLifts, fraternities relied on group chats, spreadsheets and phone calls to coordinate rides, using multiple different apps to communicate. Drivers might receive calls while already transporting someone, making it difficult to keep track of who needs a ride next.
Karson Hunzeker, a sophomore pre-health major and Phi Delta Theta’s risk management chair, said the fraternity previously used an Excel spreadsheet to schedule sober driving shifts. Each night, the drivers’ names and phone numbers would be sent to the fraternity and sorority group chats.
Hunzeker said the system worked, but “it was rough” and could become difficult to manage with people needing rides at the same time.
“It’s made it a lot cleaner,” Hunzeker said about GreekLifts. “Just a lot more efficient with getting a sober ride home.”
GreekLifts works similarly to a rideshare service. Students enter a guest code they received from a fraternity to request a ride. They are automatically put in an available driver’s queue. The driver sees the pickup and drop-off locations, and it takes one tap to open the map from the app.
The app also allows fraternity members to view and manage their driving shifts, including swapping or selling shifts to other members.
Fraternities can share their guest codes with sorority group chats, allowing sorority members to request rides for free. The codes also allow alumni, students outside of Greek life and anyone else to use the service for fraternity events.
The app recently introduced a paid membership option for sororities. The additional features allow sororities to see who drove their members, as well as access pickup and drop-off timestamps.
The app does not track the riders’ locations, the founders said. They made this decision to protect riders’ privacy.
Another feature of GreekLifts is that riders enter how many passengers are in their group, allowing the app to assign a driver with enough available seats.
Previously, some fraternity members had to transport more passengers than their vehicles could safely accommodate.
“Sometimes you go to pick somebody up with the old system, and there’d be people that have to sit on laps,” Hunzeker said.
Hunzeker said having directions readily available and not having to answer phone calls to know who to pick up next has made it easier for sober drivers.
“Being able just to know when you’re done with the ride, you see who’s next, turn on your Google Maps route and then just go,” Hunzeker said. “It’s definitely made that a lot safer, too.”
KJ Kolhof, a sophomore finance major and member of Pi Kappa Alpha, has experience using GreekLifts as both a driver and a rider. He said the app has made a noticeable difference in how the fraternity coordinates rides.
“It’s so much better in my opinion. It’s a lot more organized and structured because before it was kind of just like a free-for-all,” Kolhof said.
Pi Kappa Alpha and Phi Delta Theta are the first chapters to use GreekLifts after its launch. Other chapters are in the onboarding process, according to the founders.
The app gives fraternities ride counts, providing a way to measure how many times they give people a safe ride home through their sober ride system.
GreekLifts has recorded 314 rides between Pi Kappa Alpha and Phi Delta Theta since the chapters began using it on Sept. 3. Pi Kappa Alpha gave 157 rides in the past 30 days, including 62 during Halloween weekend.
GreekLifts has received varied reactions from fraternity members in Phi Delta Theta, Hunzeker said. Younger members have generally been more receptive, while some older members are more accustomed to the previous system.
“A lot of younger members like it because they haven’t really dealt with the old system for that long,” Hunzeker said.
Kolhof said most members in Pi Kappa Alpha have responded positively. He also said the founders have been receptive to feedback from the students using the app.
“It’s kind of cool to hear my feedback actually be taken into consideration,” Kolhof said.
One feature Kolhof said he would like to see is an estimated arrival time for riders. He said the founders are actively developing the feature.
The founders have continued making changes based on feedback from students. Raboin said the number of students using the app has helped the team identify areas for improvement.
“We’ve implemented so many changes because with that many rides, you get feedback from a ton of other college kids who are actually using the app,” Raboin said.
For Kolhof, the difference between the previous system and GreekLifts has been significant.
“It’s like night-and-day difference,” he said.
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