How Schools Can Streamline Community Service Tracking

High schools regularly recognize the good that community service can do in their community, but tedious reporting methods – combined with infrequent service opportunities – require a way to relieve administrators of the major time commitment it takes to track every student’s service while also providing students with a more meaningful service experience. Alleviating the tracking burden starts with eliminating the need for paper forms and other tedious methods of service reporting.

Schools also want a way to connect their students with compelling service projects from nonprofits like Habitat for Humanity and A Woman’s Place instead of just painting walls and picking up trash.

Community Service Tracking Today

Today, the process relies primarily on paper forms and generally follows this process:

1. Students print out service forms
2. Students bring service forms with them to their community service project
3. Students have nonprofit staff sign the form and give a description of the service performed
4. Students bring the service back to the school service coordinator (campus minister, counselor, teacher etc.)
5. School service coordinators verify the service; if the service is not verified, the student must address the issue with the nonprofit and/or school
6. Once verified, students add their service hours to a school database manually

Community Service Manager from Image One

We believe that community service tracking has too many steps. With Community Service Manager, a new web-based service from Image One, the process now looks like this:

1. Students sign up for a verified service opportunity
2. Students participate and check-in with service provider who will verify student was there

How it Works

Currently, students find out about service opportunities through their school bulletin, announcements or their own research. With Community Service Manager, current service connections – as well as other local non-profit organizations – will now have the administrative ability to post their opportunities directly to the website for students to sign up for. Streamlining the process of finding service events will not only relieve current time commitments for the school’s service coordinator, but will guarantee that students are participating in the most meaningful service events available.

As mentioned above, a “verified service opportunity” is an event posted by an established service organization. When a student signs up for an event on Community Service Manager, their Service Completion Status will begin pending. The service coordinator has the ability to verify the student’s attendance upon completion of the event, which will automatically log the student’s completed service hours. These completed and verified service hours will be available to students and parents for future reference, and also provide students with a feature to add reflections or photos from the event.

For high school service coordinators, Community Service Manager grants administrative access to monitor student service, send reminder/warning emails and much more. This is intended to provide the service coordinator with the ability to monitor student service without needing to be involved so deeply in the process. Lastly, the site has full security features and excel capabilities for convenient importing/exporting.

Contact us to learn how Community Service Manager can be utilized by your school and a quote