Best practices for a successful school reading fundraiser

Setting up a Beanstack reading fundraiser at your school is an easy way to raise money and reinforce a culture of reading in your community. Here are a few tips to optimize your fundraiser's impact and get those donations flowing in!

Logistics
Goals and prizes
Promotion
Coaching your readers and raisers

Logistics

Start planning at least a month in advance.
It's best to have plenty of lead time to plan your readathon and get the word out. Create your reading fundraiser in Beanstack at least a month before it starts so you can organize prizes, ask your success manager any questions, and start advertising.
Start and end your fundraiser on school days and run it over at least two weekends.
Starting your reading fundraiser when students are in class helps build hype for the fundraiser from the get-go, with flyers, announcements, or even a kickoff pep rally. Running your fundraiser over at least two weekends is the sweet spot for getting the word out to family, friends, and community members for maximum donations. And having it end when students are in school lets you encourage one final push!
Make sure the Search by Reader Name setting is on.
Within your fundraiser setup, there's an "Enable Search By Reader Name For Fundraisers" setting that defaults on. This lets prospective donors search for participating students from your fundraiser's landing page—making it much easier for donors to find a student, see their progress, and make a donation.
Share a tangible fundraising benefit in your description and materials.
Include the real-life impact of your readathon in its description, promotional messages, and marketing materials. Whether you're hoping to buy new books for the library, invest in new technology, or create a scholarship fund, share that need with your community. It can be especially impactful to break down a big goal, like by saying, "Every $8 raised helps us buy a new library book. Donate to help us reach $2,400 for 300 new books!"

Goals and prizes

Set community goals for minutes read and money donated.
Watching the school's reading and fundraising progress toward a community goal is a big motivating factor for donors and participants alike. You can set your overall fundraising goal within your reading fundraiser setup and set a school-wide reading goal within your admin dashboard's Site Settings section.
Offer prizes that stoke class or grade competition.
Friendly competition for prizes can make a big difference in participation! Offering one or two overall prizes, like a gift certificate, pizza party, or pep rally, to the class or grade that raises the most donations or reads the most minutes can ignite the competitive drive in your student body.
Set individual reading and donation goals and include prizes at strategic milestones.
Rewarding students with prizes for reading and donations helps keep all readers motivated and invested, regardless of their socioeconomic status. Consider using our prize coupons for a dress-down day, homework pass, or extra book checkout or create experiences like a dance party or field trip that students unlock once they hit a certain number of minutes or donations.

Promotion

Start outreach and marketing at least two weeks in advance.
Start building the hype for your reading fundraiser two to four weeks in advance with email and newsletter messages to families, flyers and banners around the school and library, social media posts, and other promotional assets. Ramp up your promotion in the week before the fundraiser by sending flyers home, doing school announcements, advertising in the paper, and demonstrating how to log in and participate.
Build staff buy-in and give them concrete action items.
Get teachers and staff excited and invested in the reading fundraiser's success. Reach out to ELA and homeroom teachers or your whole staff two to four weeks before your fundraiser launches to demonstrate how it works, answer questions, and give them concrete action items, promotional materials, and a timeline to promote reading and sharing, like:
1. send home the provided parent letter the Monday before the fundraiser start date.
2. pass out the fundraiser bookmark to your students on the start date.
3. read and log together as a class for 10 minutes a day.
Hold a kickoff event.
Get your student body and wider community excited for the readathon with a kickoff event, like a family movie night, author visit, or ice cream social.
Promote far, wide, and often.
Share your fundraiser's overall progress daily and highlight top raisers and readers to bolster competition. You can congratulate students who get more than five donations on a "wall of fame" bulletin board, create a display in your main hall, post banners in the library, set up signs in the parking lot, announce rankings in morning announcements, and post frequent social media progress updates for the whole community to see.

Coaching your readers and raisers

Make sure families know how to use the Beanstack app to participate.
At-home logging, sharing, and fundraising are key to your reading fundraiser's success. Send tailored messages to parents to let them know how to download and log into the mobile app, and then how to find and share their student's fundraising page.
Customize and leverage individual donation pages.
Most reading fundraiser donations come through individual student and teacher fundraising pages, so make sure your school's students and families know how to add their photos to their profiles and to share their pages widely.
Give students and families concrete action items.
Compile a short, actionable list of things for families to do to reach their fundraising goal, like:
1. share a photo, link, and pre-written message on social media.
2. ask at least three people to donate.
3. follow up and ask the same people for donations at least twice.