Successfully Forging Ahead

There are three primary ways that BlazerPulse will help UAB: 1) Across UAB, students, faculty, and staff are participating in highly impactful community engagement projects. But often we don’t know what others at UAB are doing, or where! 2) Community partners report confusion about how best to connect with UAB. BlazerPulse will serve as a virtual front door for community partners. 3) Community engagement is one of UAB’s four mission pillars. We have data about how we are performing across all of our other mission pillars- except community engagement.

BlazerPulse can help you find ways to impact your community, meet new people, and keep track of your activities. By participating in BlazerPulse, you become eligible for UAB volunteer recognition programs for faculty, students, and staff. BlazerPulse can communicate with other platforms currently being used such as BANNER,ORACLE, Engage, and Profiles so that you can track your personal community engagement.

More than just volunteer work can be added to BlazerPulse. Use BlazerPulse to register UAB and non-UAB participants for public lectures programs offered for free to the community, or community-based research projects. You can also record your service to non-profit organizations through Boards and other leadership roles.

All you need to do is claim your account and complete your profile. All UAB students and faculty already have an account made for them. In order to claim the account, go to uab.edu/blazerpulse. In the top right-hand corner select “Log-in”. In the pop-up menu select “Log-in with BlazerID”. Once you have logged in, select “Account” in the dropdown menu under your name. From here you should be able to fill out your personal information including the causes you care about and the skills you have.

Filling out your profile information is important because this help groups find you for events that you may have the skills for or might be interested in.

Create an impact in one of the following ways:

• Register for an event on BlazerPulse. If you have already registered for the event, select “My Registrations” by scrolling over the “My GivePulse” button in the account tab at the top right of the screen. Under “Actions” select “Add Impact” from the dropdown menu. All of your information should be filled out already. Click “Save Impact” before leaving the page.
• If you are adding an impact for an event you have not registered for, select “Add Impact” on the BlazerPulse home page. From there you should be able to select the group and add the impact by filling out the necessary information.
• If you can’t find the group you served with, select the blue “Can’t Find It?” button in the “Add Impact” screen. There you should be able to fill out all the necessary information including the contact information of the verifier.

Under your name in the top right corner, select “Account”. In the account settings menu on the left side of the screen, select “Settings”. The box to set your account to private will be in the middle of the menu. Hit “Save Changes” before leaving the page.

You’ll want to affiliate with another group. Affiliating allows groups to share events with one another. It also allows administrators to see the shared impacts between the two groups. To affiliate with another group you must be an administrator of your page. Go to the main page of the group that you wish to affiliate with. Under the administrators section of the page click the “Affiliate” button in the “Get the word out” section. From here you will be able to set event sharing options. This will also allow you to add the other group as an administrator or event manager for your group. Once you have filled that page out, hit “Send Request”. This will send the affiliation request to the other groups for approval.

You can search for service opportunities and opportunities to connect based on a keyword search from the main mobile landing page. For example, if you enter “environment” it will show you upcoming service opportunities and groups that are active around environmental issues. You can also check details about upcoming events you’ve registered for under “Dashboard.”

You can also use the mobile app as an administrator of an event. Hit Profile/Switch to Admin. If you’d like to sign participants into an event so that their impact is automatically recorded, you can go to Sign In and search for the event. When you click on the event, the app will display a list of everyone who registered. Swipe right to sign someone in, swipe left to record that they did not show up.

In order to change administrators for a group, you will need permission from a current administrator. From the “manage group” page select “users” then “manage memberships”. From the dropdown menus under “actions”, the current administrator will be able to add and take away administrator access.

There are a couple of ways to find an event on BlazerPulse. The easiest way to scroll down to the “events” section of the BlazerPulse homepage and you can see what’s coming up. You can also select “Get Involved” in the top right-hand corner of the screen. From that page, you can browse by keyword, causes, skills, type, date, and other parameters.

Once you have found an event, you can register for it by scrolling to the “Shifts and Dates” section of the event page. Select “Register” for the date and time you wish to serve. Some groups may ask for more information than others while registering. Once you have filled out the proper information (most will be auto-populated typically) it will confirm your registration.

Here are a couple important things to remember when it comes to recording impacts. You can…

• Sharing impacts with multiple groups: At the bottom of the “Add Impact” screen, there will be a box that has all of your groups listed with check-boxes next to their name. Simply click the checkbox and once your impact is added it will be shared with those groups. Note: You can only share impacts with groups that you are a member of.
• Auto-sharing impacts with groups: If you are consistently sharing your impacts with specific groups, you may wish to turn on auto-sharing for those groups. Under your name in the top right hand corner scroll over “My GivePulse” and select “My Groups”. This page will list all of the groups you are a member of. On the right side of the group’s box you will see a small arrow. Click the arrow and move your cursor over “more options”, then click “always share impacts”. It will now automatically have this group selected when you add impacts. You can still deselect that group within the “add impact” screen if you wish to not share specific impacts with them.
• Adding impacts with non-partners: If you can’t find the group you served with, select the blue “Can’t Find It?” button in the “Add Impact” screen. There you should be able to fill out all the necessary information including the contact information of the verifier.

To customize your page you first need to click on the “Manage” button next to the page’s picture. Most of your custom options are going to be under the “Customize” tab on the left side of the screen. One example of something to add to your class page are “threads” on your wall. You can set these to be creatable by anyone in the class or you can make it an administrator function if you wish to use the page for class discussion. You can also rename the labels on your page (for example, you may want to use the term “projects” instead of “events”).

BlazerPulse is UAB’s community engagement platform. If you are a local non-profit and would like to partner with UAB, please create an account on givepulse.com and affiliate with UAB.

Shifts are for opportunities where you need volunteers for specific sets of time. Shifts allow you to set exactly when the volunteers with start and end their service. Timeslots are for more open ended opportunities. Timeslots allow you to set a period of time where the user can volunteer select when they want to serve. Example: You may have a need for volunteers anywhere from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm. Using timeslots, volunteers can select to serve from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm. Note: You do have the ability to set a minimum number of hours that the user must serve.

The responsibility of verifying impacts falls on the opportunity organizer. It is important to verify all legitimate impacts as quickly as possible, as many of our students could need these hours for a class. In order to verify impacts you just need to go to the “Manages Impacts” page under “Impacts” in your page dashboard. From here you can verify multiple impacts by selecting the checkbox next to the user’s name. Then all you need to do is select “Bulk Actions” and “Verify Selected Impacts”. You can also verify individual impacts by finding the user and selecting “Verify Impact” in the dropdown menu on the right side of the screen.

Using BlazerPulse, you can create custom impact reports. To do this, start from your page dashboard. Select “Impacts” from the menu on the left of the screen and then click “Manage Impacts”. On this page select “Configure Layout”. This menu will allow you to select which items you want to look at. Once you have done that, click the blue “Actions” button and then click “Export”. This will give you the option to export all of the data or just the items visible on the page. Once you select your preference, it will export the information into an excel document.