At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, experiential learning and community engagement are deeply connected to student success, especially for students pursuing careers in medicine, healthcare, and public service.
For Katelyn Bodwell, Program Officer at the Carolina Center for Public Service, the need for a comprehensive engagement tracking platform became clear.
UNC-Chapel Hill’s Service Scholars program required students to track service hours, complete trainings, participate in service-learning coursework, and build long-term portfolios documenting their engagement experiences.
The challenge? Their custom-built database was no longer sustainable.
“We needed another solution,” Katelyn explained. “GivePulse seemed to be a really great solution to be able to help students build that service portfolio and something that's sustainable for a long period of time and user-friendly.”
Manually migrating thousands of student records to GivePulse took time.
The onboarding process involved approvals from IT, administration, and data governance teams while also transferring years of student engagement records into the platform.
“This is tens of thousands of service hours that were transitioning to a new portal,” Katelyn said.
Without an API connection between systems, the migration relied heavily on spreadsheets and manual uploads.
“It was literally downloading spreadsheets,” she shared. “It was like the biggest puzzle that I had to put together.”
Throughout the process, GivePulse support helped UNC-Chapel Hill customize fields, organize historical data, and ensure records remained accurate throughout the transition process.
“I couldn't load 10,000 service impacts by myself, but I was able to say, "Okay, here's all my data, help me figure out how to put this in GivePulse," and so the GivePulse team really helped with transitioning over and making sure our data was correct, accurate, like in the right spot, that we were able to make custom fields to fit what we needed and all of that.” “So yeah, GivePulse support was really a big friend of mine.”
- Katelyn Bodwell
Today, UNC-Chapel Hill uses GivePulse to help students build comprehensive records of their experiential learning and community engagement activities.
For many students pursuing medical and healthcare careers, those documented experiences are critical.
“A lot of our students are looking to get into medical fields, who want that hands-on experience,” Katelyn explained. “It's a great way for them to prove that they have that experience.”
The platform allows students to:
Katelyn believes this kind of centralized portfolio fills a major gap in higher education.
“There’s academic portfolios and there’s transcripts and there’s resumes, but having a place that is truly for service and community engagement and experiential learning is really valuable.”
GivePulse has also helped streamline and foster relationships with community partner organizations.
Instead of routing every volunteer opportunity through university staff, community partners can independently create and manage opportunities directly within GivePulse.
“They don’t have to really go through us to be able to connect to students,” Katelyn shared. “That’s huge.”
This autonomy allows organizations to:
The result is a more scalable and efficient engagement ecosystem for both staff and partners.
One of the biggest advantages has been the platform's adaptability.
From survey workflows to service tracking and badge systems, the platform can be customized to support a wide range of engagement models.
“It’s so adaptable to what we need it to be. If you want to build a survey, you can build any kind of survey that you want; if you want to log service hours, you can make a group that logs service hours. There's so much flexibility in it. ”
That flexibility has also positioned GivePulse as an increasingly essential tool in the community engagement space.
“I definitely feel like it’s becoming one of those platforms that community engagement professionals are kind of expected to know how to use,” Katelyn said.
As UNC-Chapel Hill continues expanding its experiential learning initiatives, they are using GivePulse to help students create meaningful service portfolios while laying the groundwork for deeper campus-community connections.
About GivePulse
GivePulse's mission is to enable everyone in the world to participate and engage in lifting their community to new heights. We do so by providing a platform to list, find, organize, and measure the impact of service-learning, community engagement, philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, and volunteerism.
Founded in 2012 in Austin, Texas, GivePulse works with 650,000+ groups, including colleges and universities, nonprofits, businesses, K-12/school districts, and cities and municipalities. Together, we connect millions of people in an effort to create positive social change.
Ready to see how we can help you achieve your community engagement goals? Schedule a demo with GivePulse today.