The University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG) has long been a national leader in community engagement, setting the standard for how institutions can support engaged faculty and staff.
As the founder of Collaboratory, UNCG pioneered a data-driven approach to tracking, assessing, and communicating the impact of community engagement.
By leveraging structured data and strategic storytelling, UNCG has sustained its reputation as a top-tier community-engaged institution and strengthened its ability to demonstrate the value of its work.
The Challenge
Despite its deep commitment to community engagement, UNCG faced a challenge familiar to many institutions: how to systematically document, measure, and share its engagement efforts. With faculty, staff, and community partners driving a vast array of initiatives, UNCG needed a centralized solution to track its impact, align engagement activities with institutional priorities, and craft a compelling narrative that reinforced its identity as an engaged institution.
The Solution
By leveraging Collaboratory UNCG has developed a dynamic, data-driven approach to documenting and amplifying its engagement story:
- “Excellence in Community Engagement & Community-Engaged Scholarship”
- UNCG periodically publishes Excellence in Community Engagement & Community-Engaged Scholarship, a multi-volume series that reflects on the evolution of engagement at the university. The most recent Volume 4 (2024) highlights UNCG’s ongoing commitment to integrating teaching, research, and service with community priorities. Collaboratory data is instrumental in informing these reports, allowing UNCG to capture engagement trends, celebrate achievements, and envision future directions.
- Strategic Storytelling with “CollaboraStories”
- UNCG created CollaboraStories, a series of case studies that use Collaboratory data to showcase key engagement initiatives on campus websites and social media campaigns, as well as reports and recognitions. These stories highlight partnerships like A Community Comes Together, a collaboration supporting integration of newly arrived Congolese refugees through empowerment and facilitating young children’s readiness for school, Community Placemaking Action Lab, using legislative theatre to surface and define pressing community needs, and craft policy responses, and the Digital Library on American Slavery, which preserves critical historical narratives. These data-driven narratives help UNCG craft and sustain its identity as a nationally recognized leader in community-engaged scholarship
- Aligning Engagement with Institutional Identity
- With Collaboratory, UNCG ensures that community engagement remains central to its institutional identity during times of transition and transformation. The platform provides a framework for demonstrating engagement’s role in research, creative activity, teaching, and service, helping UNCG align engagement initiatives within its strategic plan and goals for demonstrating the value of reciprocal, mutually beneficial partnerships.
- Fostering Connection
- Collaboratory has been used off- and on-campus to help potential partners find each other, especially those who are new to the area or to community engagement. As a publicly accessible database, this increases access and opportunity to connect the under-connected.
“In the changing face of higher education in the 21st century, Collaboratory is one of the most important tools that a university leader can have.”
Dr. Emily Janke
Director, Institute of Community & Economic Engagement; Professor, Peace and Conflict Studies
The Outcome
Collaboratory has transformed the way UNCG systematically documents and communicates its engagement efforts, strengthening its national reputation and enhancing its ability to attract funding, partnerships, and recognition. By embedding engagement data into institutional decision-making and storytelling, UNCG continues to lead in the field of community-engaged research and practice.
Strengthen Your Identity as an Engaged Institution
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