For students and families alike, the school book fair is a wonderful time to energize your community on the power of reading. Usually put on by the school in the fall or spring term (maybe both) and lasting around a week, a book fair provides a great way to promote wonderful stories that families can purchase and read together at home.
Now, while book fairs have been around for years, the concept of promoting a reading challenge to support your book fair is a relatively new concept. With Read for My School, you can easily promote a read-athon that not only supports your book fair but even energizes it providing a wonderful way to raise literacy awareness and money that can be used to fund prizes and sell more books!
In the past year, we've seen more and more customers (schools) use our platform for just an event so we thought we should take some best practices we've seen so you can take advantage of this great opportunity. Below are simple steps that you can take to energize your book fair and raise more money while extending your literacy message to your community.
- Launch your read-athon 30 days before the start of your book fair. This provides a great opportunity to get your community excited about your book fair as well as to support a fundraiser that raises money and drives more book sales.
- Use the book fair "theme" as a part of your read-athon story. Most book fair companies have a "literacy theme" that you see from their catalogs or if you promote your book fair to support a literacy event (Example: Read Across America), then use that has the main story to support your read-athon as well. The more donors rally around your fundraising and literacy message, the more they will participate and drive fundraising profits that can be used in your event.
- Set up your free fundraiser account on RFMS set your reading and fundraising goals with the goal of getting as much participation since at the end of your fundraiser, use can celebrate your goals during your book fair. Set goals that both are achievable and drive excitement for your book fair.
- Build out weekly rewards and incentives that celebrate classroom and individual achievements in your read-athon. A perfect way to reward is to state that the top classrooms get to use some of your fundraising profits to rebuild their classroom libraries. Teachers will love it as well as students will work together collectively to reach their goals - all with the focus on reading! You can also reward tops readers on a weekly basis and use some of the profits for students to purchase books when you launch your book fair. This is a wonderful way to get kids excited about potentially getting a FREE book to take home.
- For a grand prize, we see a lot of schools fund the purchase of a book vending machine that can provide excitement throughout the year. Imagine a collective fundraising goal with your read-athon to purchase your very own custom book machine that provides wonderful stories all year long!
These are just some ideas on how combining a fundraiser can actually support and energize your upcoming book fair. It's easy, it raises money, and more importantly, gets kids excited about reading!
Need help designing your book fair/read-athon?
Create your free fundraiser account on Read for My School and a support representative will reach out to discuss your book fair/fundraising requirements. We believe this combination will leave a lasting impact on your community and be embraced by school faculty and your donors.
