CatServe
CatServe is MSU's community engagement platform, connecting students, faculty, and staff across campus with our partners in the Gallatin Valley and beyond. Use CatServe to find opportunities to get involved in our community, and explore what your fellow Bobcats are doing to make a difference!
CatServe is also the platform that the Office of Student Engagement is using to track and verify VIM hours for Club Funding!
Frequently Asked Questions
General Questions
To add an Impact (Volunteer Hours) for VIM funding, go to Subgroups → Registered Student Organizations → Subgroups → Your Club.
Hours must be uploaded directly to the appropriate club for them to count towards VIM funding. The Office of Student Engagement will not count hours otherwise.
There are three primary ways that CatServe will help MSU:
1) Across MSU, students, faculty, and staff are participating in highly impactful community engagement projects. But often we don’t know what others at MSU are doing, or where!
2) Community partners report confusion about how best to connect with MSU. CatServe will act as a virtual front door for community partners.
3) Club funding is based off Volunteer hours. To learn more, check out our club funding page!
CatServe can help you find ways to impact your community, meet new people, and keep track of your activities. By participating in CatServe, you become eligible for RSO club funding. CatServe can communicate with other platforms currently being used such as CatsConnect, so you can track your personal community engagement.
Technical Questions
All you need to do is claim your account and complete your profile. All MSU students, faculty, and staff already have an account made for them. In order to claim the account:
- Navigate to montana.givepulse.com.
- In the top right-hand corner select “Log-in”. In the pop-up menu select “Log-in with NetID”.
- 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.
To add an Impact (Volunteer Hours) for VIM funding, go to Subgroups → Registered Student Organizations → Subgroups → Your Club.
Hours must be uploaded directly to the appropriate club for them to count towards VIM funding. The Office of Student Engagement will not count hours otherwise.
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 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 CatServe. The easiest way to scroll down to the “events” section of the CatServe 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.
Community Partner
CatServe is MSU’s community engagement platform.If you are a local non-profit and would like to partner with MSU, please read this article about how to create a group!
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 CatServe, 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.
More CatServe Resources
- Access helpful videos created by GivePulse, the company that hosts our CatServe platform.
- GivePulse also maintains a database of FAQs.
- Have a question about the platform? You can email GivePulse Support at any time: [email protected].