Community Service Hour tracking for students

@Courtney Stern we have a custom field “Community Service Hours” and we have a dedicated Community Service email that students send their signed community service forms to and a google sheet that we keep for the hours logged. Google sheet has student information to bulk upload quarterly.

@Courtney Stern - We use a third-party service to collect hours reports from students and verifications of those hours from the agency/organization. Currently we use x2Vol.com. We are probably going to switch to MobileServe.org for next year. MobileServe will pull student data directly from the SIS to create the appropriate student accounts in MobileServe. Teacher accounts are created by CSV import.

Both services allow students to report the hours online. The report will generate an email to the supervisor at the organization, who can verify the report. Someone at the school then looks at the verified hours to decide if the work will get credit toward the requirement or not (based on your rules and the description of the work done).

We report a Pass/Fail grade on the year-end report card. (I add the grade for each student by data import.)

@Julie Horvath:
Hi Brian, I am wondering if you switched to MobileCause. We are about to do this, so I was wondering if I could get any intel on the process. Currently we use x2Vol.com.

We are switching to MobileServe for 2023-24. The set-up process is fairly easy to do. We had a couple of conversations and completed a form with questions about how we wanted things to work (which graduating classes, what categories of service, what approval options are acceptable, etc).

After that, I followed instructions they provided to connect our Blackbaud service to our MobileServe account. Student records were copied over in a few minutes. The student data is updated daily.

One thing to consider is: faculty accounts are created manually, and there is no good way to distinguish levels of access. At my school, advisors could sign into x2vol to see the records for students in their advisory. In MobileServe, we will run a report and update a spreadsheet weekly so that advisors can see the info. It's not ideal, but we think that the rest of the features make it a better choice for us.

We have a similar process to @Geoffrey Goodfellow. It's set up as a class and hours are added to a single assignment grade. Our faculty can then post service opportunities to the bulletin board and Topics pages. The Bulletin board also has the link to the Google Form where students report their hours.

The big thing is making sure families understand what the percentage grade means. Initially we had some students worried that they were “failing” community service as they started accumulating hours but everyone seems to understand the system now. It's VERY helpful keeping the information within Blackbaud so students and advisors don't have to leave the system to find their recorded hours, report hours, and find service opportunities.