Minnesota Success Story Cotter Schools
Cotter Schools · Catholic School
“Since using Helper Helper, everything is in one place: opportunities, tracking, total hours. It is so simple to use for students and staff alike. No more students claiming they turned in service hours, no more students trying to track down adults after the fact, and no more parents emailing me to confirm hours. In short, Helper Helper saves everyone a lot of time.”
Before Helper Helper, every service hour at Cotter Schools in Winona started on paper. Students carried a Cotter Community Service sheet to be signed by an adult on site and wrote a few sentences about what they did and the impact it had. Staff then typed the hours into the FACTS student information system, sorted the sheets by grade and alphabet, and stored them for four years. "It was a very arduous task just to track the hours," says Marisa Corcoran, Cotter's Director of Campus Ministry, "and FACTS had no reporting functions available."
Today opportunities, sign-ups, hours, and totals all live in one place. Students find and sign up for service in the app, community partners post their own opportunities and can see who has signed up, and Marisa approves student-added opportunities once a day. She no longer writes letters verifying hours, because each student's service record is available instantly. "Allowing others to post opportunities has been a game changer," she says. The work that used to take a day or two each week now takes a few hours, and because the process is the same every year, returning students and staff need almost no retraining.
Cotter asks every student for 20 hours a year, and each grade has its own goal, with several goals inside a grade when a program calls for it. "My favorite aspect of the app is the circle that fills in as students complete their goals," Marisa says. "Students are no longer saying they don't know how many hours they've completed." Reports by student, class year, homeroom, sport, or club take minutes, and the live hours widget runs on the school's TV monitors and social media pages, where everyone watches the total climb. Cotter now celebrates when it passes 10,000 hours.
The photos students attach to their logs get downloaded each quarter and shared on social media, and they anchor the Service Awards ceremony, where Cotter likes to point out that most students go well beyond the required 20 hours. Students and staff sign in with their Google accounts (the tech department reported the setup was easy), and since parents do not get a login of their own, the responsibility for logging hours stays with the students. "Not only is the software wonderful, so is the Helper Helper staff," Marisa says. "They are very personable, helpful, and easy to work with."
How Helper Helper Supports Minnesota Schools
Getting Started
Helper Helper integrates directly with the student information systems (SIS) and single sign-on (SSO) providers your school already uses, including Google for Education, Microsoft, PowerSchool, ClassLink, Canvas, and more. Students sign in with their existing school credentials and rosters sync automatically.
Already tracking hours in spreadsheets, a homegrown database, or another platform? We'll import your existing data into Helper Helper at no additional charge so students don't lose credit for hours they've already completed.
Same-Day Support from Real People
No chatbots or ticket queues. When you need help, you’ll hear back the same day from Krista, Chelsea, or Matt. Our team knows schools and provides guided onboarding and Zoom trainings to get your program up and running.
Simple, Affordable Pricing
Helper Helper starts at $500 per year for up to 200 students and includes everything you need. Additional students cost $2.50 per student per year.
- Hour verification & reporting
- Goal tracking & real-time progress
- Service portfolios for students
- iOS, Android & web apps
Schedule a Demo
Pick a time that works for you. We’ll walk through how Helper Helper can serve your school or district and answer any questions you may have.
HECVAT-assessed, FERPA-compliant, encrypted in-transit and at-rest, hosted on AWS infrastructure.
This designation benefits both parties: for your school or district, it means you can deploy Helper Helper without the administrative burden of collecting individual parent consent for every student — the same way you onboard other essential technology platforms. For Helper Helper, it means we are held to the same strict data-handling standards as your own employees, giving your community confidence that student records are protected by the full weight of federal privacy law.
The FTC provides guidance confirming that schools may consent on behalf of parents in the educational context under COPPA. Please request to see our Notice of Data Practices for Children Under 13 and our Privacy Policy for further details.
The HECVAT was developed by the higher education community (EDUCAUSE) and is widely used by colleges and universities to assess the IT security, data protection, and privacy practices of third-party software vendors before adoption. While originally designed for higher ed, its comprehensive framework is equally valuable for K–12 schools and districts looking for a rigorous, standardized way to evaluate whether a vendor meets their security and compliance requirements.
AWS operates the most widely adopted and trusted cloud infrastructure in the world, with security practices that meet or exceed the requirements of federal agencies, financial institutions, and healthcare providers. Their data centers are protected by 24/7 on-site security, biometric access controls, redundant power and networking, and continuous monitoring.
AWS is independently audited against the most rigorous standards in the industry — including SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, and PCI DSS — and provides industry-leading uptime guarantees backed by a 99.99% service-level agreement. This means your school can count on Helper Helper being available when students and advisors need it.
Administrators can be scoped to specific groups, schools, grade levels, or graduating classes — an NHS advisor sees only their NHS members, a school principal sees only their school, and a district coordinator sees the full district.
Outside community partners receive organization admin roles that let them post their own volunteer opportunities, manage sign-ups, and confirm attendance for events they host, without any visibility into student records, other organizations’ events, or school-internal data.
Helper Helper is fully FERPA-compliant, giving your community confidence that student records are protected by the full weight of federal privacy law. We never sell or share student data.
For Minnesota schools, we sign your district's Student Data Privacy Agreement and comply with the Minnesota Student Data Privacy Act (Minn. Stat. § 13.32), which prohibits selling student data or using it for targeted advertising.
Minnesota Schools Using Helper Helper
