Ohio University launches community engagement platform

Ohio University is enhancing its efforts to connect students and their communities through meaningful engagement including volunteer opportunities, community-based internships and research, and community-engaged courses.

OHIO has launched GivePulse, an online platform that helps connect communities. Students, employees, and community members can find, recruit for, and manage volunteer opportunities, curricular service-learning, community-based internships, and other community events using GivePulse. Through OHIO’s subscription, community organizations in the region can leverage GivePulse at no cost as both a comprehensive volunteer management and donor management platform that is accessible to University stakeholders and the public.

“At the Center for Campus and Community Engagement (CCCE), we are always looking for ways to better facilitate engagement between our students and our communities while building mutually beneficial community partnerships,” said Mary Nally, director of the CCCE. “The GivePulse platform allows us to do that by enabling our students, faculty, staff, and community partners to list, find, organize and measure the impact of community service and engagement, philanthropy, and volunteerism in our communities.”

Nally said GivePulse is a highly customizable platform that provides dynamic tools for volunteer and event management, including functionality for instructors to jointly coordinate curricular service-learning opportunities with community partners. GivePulse integrates with Blackboard to seamlessly move students into the platform, and with other Ohio University platforms such as Bobcat Connect and Student Opportunity Center. It also provides a robust and flexible data infrastructure that supports institution-wide reporting, as well as specific tracking and assessment needs at the unit level. Capturing these metrics will help to inform ongoing best practices for community engagement at OHIO.

For OHIO students, GivePulse provides listings of local community organizations, volunteer opportunities, community-based internships, and community work study positions in addition to the tools to track their community service and engagement.

The CCCE looks forward to welcoming more community partners to the GivePulse platform and helping the University community leverage the tool to support meaningful community engagement. So far 46 partner organizations are active in the platform.

“We’re excited to support the work of our community partners and help facilitate meaningful community-engaged experiential learning for our students by leveraging the GivePulse platform across our region,” said Courtney Lefebvre, assistant director of the Center for Campus and Community Engagement. “Our hope is that this can be a powerful tool to catalyze civic engagement in all of our campus communities — and we encourage students and others in the OHIO community to access GivePulse and begin using the tool to find ways to engage.”

Sign in to GivePulse using your OHIO credentials to find community engagement opportunities, find volunteers, and track community engagement. For more information about using GivePulse, visit the CCCE website.