CCUW FAQs

University of Washington is committed to community-engaged research, teaching and learning. In order to support our UW and community partners in working well together, we need an “enterprise-wide” (all of UW) system that can:

• Serve as a coordinated hub of activity for UW and community members to explore, connect, communicate, share opportunities and collaborate on projects, courses and other efforts related to civic and community engagement.
• Document, track, visualize, report and assess community-engaged learning, civic engagement, community-based scholarship, and other activities across the three campuses’ students, faculty, partners and units.
• Enable learning across the university as faculty, staff and students understand the larger ecosystem and collaborate more effectively and efficiently.
• Increase transparency and accountability and reduce the barriers for community partners to collaborate with UW.

• The goal is to make CE work easier, from managing to documenting activities. But we are just getting started, and a switch to a new platform involves experimenting, compromising and learning.
• CCUW aims to help faculty find, manage, and communicate with community partners and partnerships for courses and research by having one whole database of people and opportunities.​
• The platform should make funded activities more readily viewable, as fiscal staff work with the admin of the activities (which will likely be the PI or a program coordinator they already work with)​.
• Training and support is available at each campus, and faculty can use the platform a little or a lot. With the ability to track partnerships, find partners, and document efforts, faculty CE should be more effectively supported and celebrated with CCUW. No funds will be taken from the unit to support CCUW.​
• Ideally CCUW will lead to a better experience for our partners as we as the UW are more coordinated in our outreach to them. Partners can affiliate with one or more units, centers and/or courses across the UW, and those affiliations are viewable on their public CCUW pages. Partners can explore UW events and other opportunities, post opportunities, and manage UW collaborations in a more coordinated way.​

• CCUW is intended to streamline the management of students in community-engaged learning courses, through tracking hours and other deliverables, and supporting communications among them, faculty, staff and partners.​
• Students will also be able to see other students on CCUW in groups they are a member of, including courses, and students whose profiles are not hidden from other groups such as the campus. they will also meet students at any partner events!​
• Partners can share events on CCUW to bring students to their organizations.​

• Partners own their own profiles, and are able to “affiliate” with whatever group they want to. They choose their point(s) of contact and ways of participating in CCUW. Many of our partners are already using this platform (GivePulse), and so a bonus is that we get to connect to them on “their turf”!​
• When a community partner affiliates with a UW course, department, center, or project group on CCUW, that affiliation is seen by members of that UW group. They can make their events and other posts visible to other groups at the UW, if they want to. But while contact information is visible, sensitive data are protected, and partners have control of all their data
• Every course, project, or other event that you create on CCUW is each team’s to administer. Key metrics about those activities are viewable for reporting by the campus and tri-campus admins. But artifacts and relationships are “owned” by you as the administrator.​
• CCUW data is FERPA compliant. Student data is handled in the following manner (more information can be found at https://www.givepulse.com/policies)
  • (1) On Community Connect UW, UW student profile information will be seen by UW employees who are working with the student on activities that the platform manages.
  • (2) If UW student profiles are not set to “Private”, then student profile information will also be seen by all who affiliate with or use Community Connect UW.
  • (3) When UW students join a UW Group or a Course on Community Connect UW, the UW employee(s) who is/are administrator(s) of that Group or Course will see UW students’ full profiles.
  • (4) When UW students register for an Event (aka position; opportunity) on Community Connect UW, the administrator(s) of that Event, which may include community partners and/or UW employees, will see the student’s name and email, (aka “directory information”), as well as any opt-in fields that the student fills out. UW employees who are administrators of the Event will see UW students’ full profiles.
  • (5) If UW students join a non-UW Group or a Course on Community Connect UW, those who are administrator(s) of that Group or Course will see UW students’ full profiles.
  • (6) If UW students comment on Community Connect UW Groups, Courses, Events, and Impacts will be seen by the administrators of those Groups, Courses, Events, and Impacts, which may include both community partners and UW employees.
  • (7) Community partners, as well as UW employees, are required keep student data confidential and to not use the data outside the purpose of the Group, Course, Event, Impact, or affiliation on Community Connect UW.
• Programs and units should continue to work with students and with community partners to ensure that everyone is aware of the risks of working in community per their normal processes.​

• Data can be used for management of projects and relationships, and for reporting. ​
• Data can be made private as needed.
• UW administrative leadership can request reports from the platform administrators. ​
• CCUW can also be a place to find activities for budget reporting, and the intention is that this data is not duplicative and should be easier to find.​

• The data you enter in CCUW is unique to the community engagement aspect of activities, perhaps information that you maybe have stored in your own spreadsheets, about partner contacts and steps for matchmaking. The intent is that you can move away from individual spreadsheets to this larger shared database. Ideally there should be a reduction in duplicative data entry. And we are still learning! ​
• CCUW pulls data from the Student Database in order to reduce duplication of effort and keep data consistent.​
• The platform also integrates with Canvas for faculty and for students to use the systems together.​
• for those at UW Tacoma, Collaboratory data will be synced with CCUW in the near future.​
• Other enterprise-wide system integrations are yet to be explored.

• We are still learning about reporting, but this is one of the main reasons we are launching CCUW: to more effectively document and report on our community-engaged activities at the personal to institutional scales.
• Data are exportable for all types of CCUW records including courses, memberships, surveys, impacts, and groups.​

• Yes! We’re creating and providing training on a regular basis, and there are many asynchronous resources from the CCUW team as well as GivePulse.​
• Resources can be found in this Google Folder.
• You can also join our weekly Office Hours (NetID required).

• Yes! CCUW has technical support for each campus, and a tri-campus system administrator as well as project manager. ​
• There is also a ticketing system, please email communityconnect@UW.edu with any support requests.​