Administrator Permissions, Responsibilities
How can I grant someone administrator access?
Any existing administrator can grant another Collaboratory faculty/staff/student user administrative permissions.You first log into your Collaboratory. Once you’ve logged in, an existing Collaboratory administrator can give someone Administrative Access via the Content Tab, selecting Members. If you have any questions about this, please see this help center article that shows you how to do this.
Where do I find answers to questions about Bulk Imports?
Bulk Import Help Center Articles (one stop shop for questions relating to bulk imports, formatting, templates)
Can an activity be private?
For staff/faculty specifically, is there any way for them to choose to make their information private? Or make their engagement in a particular activity private?
Faculty and staff have the ability to keep their activities in a drafted form, which does not allow them to be publicly shared anywhere. However, those activities are pulled into the larger aggregated reports, which Collaboratory administrators may access so they may be counted in the aggregate numbers.
Activities, if unpublished, would still be reported in the aggregate numbers but not displayed in the public profile.
How is Collaboratory access removed when employees leave?
With Single Sign-On (SSO) enabled, users automatically lose access to Collaboratory once they are no longer affiliated with the institution. When employees leave, administrators have several options within the platform: they can reassign the individual’s activities to new leads or principal investigators, retain the former employee’s association for historical accuracy, or archive the activities and remove the profile entirely. Many institutions use the end of the academic year as a natural time to review and update member data.
Upcoming Enhancements
Does Collaboratory integrate with other tools?
Can data from Collaboratory be pulled into other platforms our campus uses to track student engagement?
Collaboratory does not offer direct integrations with student-focused hour tracking platforms such as Campus Labs, GivePulse, or similar tools. This is intentional, as these platforms are typically designed to capture individual student-level data - like service hours or event attendance - while Collaboratory is focused on documenting engagement at the institutional level. That said, Collaboratory does offer a Reporting API that allows institutions to programmatically extract data from the system and bring it into other platforms. This can be a valuable tool for campuses looking to enhance visibility across systems or build custom dashboards. However, it’s important to understand that the structure and intent of the data in Collaboratory is fundamentally different from what student hour tracking tools are designed to manage. Collaboratory captures detailed, relational data about activities—such as the nature of the partnerships, populations served, focus areas, and alignment with institutional priorities - which typically go far beyond what student platforms are built to receive. As a result, any data transfer between the systems is not one-to-one, and the value of such a transfer is often limited unless carefully customized. Rather than serving as a repository for granular student-level data, Collaboratory is intended to complement those platforms by offering a broader, strategic view of institutional engagement. Many institutions use student-level data from tools like Campus Labs or GivePulse as a starting point to identify larger student-led or institutionally supported engagement efforts (e.g., Days of Service, ongoing student partnerships) that can then be meaningfully documented in Collaboratory.
Does Collaboratory have an API?
Does Collaboratory have an API that would bring data into other spaces/systems?
Yes, Collaboratory has an outbound reporting API that allows your institution to automatically pull real-time data from your Collaboratory portal into your own internal and external tools — like dashboards, websites, faculty reporting systems, Salesforce, etc. The API is designed to provide secure, programmatic access to Collaboratory’s data through RESTful JSON endpoints. Institutions can use it to extract a wide range of data, including information about activities, partnerships, outcomes, and participation, filtered by criteria such as date range or program. The API supports both real-time queries and scheduled data pulls, making it possible to keep websites, dashboards, and reports consistently up to date without manual exports. Authentication is handled through API tokens or OAuth, ensuring secure access to institutional data. With clear documentation and flexibility in how data is structured and filtered, Collaboratory’s Reporting API provides a reliable foundation for institutions looking to integrate engagement data into internal and external environments and streamline their reporting and analysis workflows. You can learn more about it HERE.
Is there the ability to create custom fields?
The majority of the Collaboratory dataset is standardized and is developed in line with best practices and literature within the field of higher education community engagement. For example, the demographic fields for racial/ethnic categories (e.g., African American) were largely pulled from the 2010 U.S. Census categories. However, additional people groups (e.g., Transgender, Military/Veterans) were identified by reviewing multiple different sources (e.g., Michigan State’s Outreach and Engagement Measurement Instrument (OEMI), other software products, and University of Western Sydney’s Tracking Institutional Community Engagement (TICE) system) in 2014, when Collaboratory was commercialized.
However, within every data field is the option to select and define “other” to capture more nuanced data/terminology. Additionally, institutions are able to create customized “tags” for programs and initiatives unique to their campus (e.g., strategic plan goals, quality enhancement plans, days of service) to aggregate their engagement activities under high priority initiatives. Lastly, the following fields are created during implementation, as they are unique to each campus:
o Units (e.g., schools, departments, centers)
o Community partners
o Courses
The Collaboratory team is constantly working, researching, engaging institutions and community engaged professionals to make our software tool iterative and enhance, improve its ability to be widely utilized on campus.
Looking ahead, support for custom fields is coming soon. This feature will allow institutions to tailor data forms even further by adding fields that meet their unique data needs, while Collaboratory continues to maintain a core of standardized fields to preserve consistency across campuses. This upcoming enhancement will offer institutions greater flexibility in data collection without compromising the integrity of a shared, inter-institutional dataset.
Student proxy access
When do students have access to edit activities?
The activity lead or a Collaboratory administrator are the only people that can access activities after it is published. If there are substantial edits, one option for a proxy is to clone an activity into a new activity form (this copies all of the data from one activity form to another activity and the activity lead would need to claim the activity). Students can also be given administrator permissions (even if only temporarily) and would then have access to continue to edit a published activity. Collaboratory administrators can grant administrator permissions via the Content tab -> Members.