Howard Gottlieb

Howard is the founder and CEO of Read-a-thon. Although around the office we just call him the Big Cheese. He spends most of his waking hours obsessing about how to make Read-a-thon the absolute best school fundraising idea anywhere on the planet Earth.

As an adult, Howard’s favorite book is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. His favorite children’s book is the Lorax by Dr. Seuss.

Kari Styne

I have been helping schools and groups raise money for 19 years. I have been married for 26 years and have 2 great children. When I am not working at Read-a-thon I enjoy crafting. I have a craft room where I could spend hours working and creating, it is great therapy for me! I also enjoy reading and can get lost in a good book fast. But the most important part of my life outside of work is my family and my faith in God. Those 2 things are the foundation of my life and I know without that I would have nothing.

Scott McGhee

I am blessed to be a designer, developer, husband, and father to 3 wildly different personalities. Our home is full of life, struggles, and love that keep me so very young at heart. I want my own children to love to read as much as I love reading to them every night.

Our households favorite books:
Calvin and Hobbes Complete Collection, Bible Superheroes, Anthing Fancy Nancy.

School fundraising had remained essentially the same for the past 40 years. Kids were selling products that were becoming more and more overpriced. The result was less money for schools and more rebellious parents who wanted no part of the process.

We decided to create a better way for schools to raise money by monetizing what schools hopefully were already doing. The problem, from the beginning, was how best to do that.

So we spent two years developing Read-a-thon as a way to not only raise money, but to get kids excited about reading. Since our inception kids have logged nearly 2,000,000,000 reading minutes on our site.

Now we have a tried and proven turnkey program that helps schools spend a couple weeks reading as their fundraiser.

A school can’t replicate what we offer. From the custom, conversion-optimized full color paperwork, to the management tools found on dashboards, to the intuitive website developed with the help of behavioral scientists to the most secure PCI compliant payment system.

We’ve helped thousands of schools and took the best practices from the most successful schools and integrated it into our program. Our top schools raise nearly $100,000 with our program. We give those same tools to every school that uses our fundraiser.

We hope every school in the world will change the way they raise money and start monetizing a focus on reading.