Easily record community service hours for high school.

What if you could access more complete and reliable information about the social impact of your students? What if you could reduce administrative headaches related to tracking community service? What if you could do it all with an app that students actually enjoy using?
MobileServe makes it possible.

The Grauer School is an independent college preparatory school near San Diego, CA that serves about 150 students in grades 7-12. The school emphasizes real-world engagement and community contribution, including volunteer work. Students are required to complete 12.5 hours of community service each year, and most students exceed that requirement.

The Grauer School began using MobileServe community service tracking software in Feb. 2016, organizing its students by class year. With MobileServe, the administrator can run reports for individual classes as well as for the school as a whole. Using the Goals feature, their admins can easily see students’ progress and identify which students need nudging, which students have met their requirement, and which students have gone above and beyond.

When a class graduates, the Grauer School admin simply removes the whole class from her dashboard. The data from the class will still show up in reports for that timeframe, but those students will no longer be able to report hours to the school. Their MobileServe accounts remain active, so they can continue tracking their service hours as long as they’d like.

The Grauer School also regularly utilizes MobileServe’s export function to import their service log data into a student grade book portal.

We’ve written a guide for educators who want to start or improve service learning programs in their schools: Developing and Managing a High School Volunteer Program.

Mercy Academy, a Catholic high school for girls in Louisville, KY, uses MobileServe for its Service Learning & Leadership Program. This experience-based program focuses on serving vulnerable populations in the community through one-on-one service and social action. All Mercy Academy students participate in this four-year program.

Mercy Academy has used MobileServe since December 2015, and with more than 26,000 hours logged, Mercy students have provided an economic value of $618,649! A key component of the program is “Summer Immersion,” which encourages students to continue service work during summer break. In the summer of 2016, Mercy Academy students recorded nearly 2,000 service hours!

When logging their time on MobileServe, students choose from five program-specific service categories, and are required to have their logs verified by a supervisor at the service organization. The Service Learning & Leadership Coordinator at Mercy also approves each submission and uses the students’ MobileServe logs to issue grades for the program.

MobileServe’s approval system allows the Coordinator to provide reasons for rejecting logs, which are emailed to the students with a link to make corrections. This process makes it easy to ensure every log is categorized correctly, so that students fulfill their program requirements.