Love how fast you guys are at responding to questions. Thank you so much!
Another amazing read-a-thon year in the books. This year we raised $58,600 and read over 650,000 minutes. Amazing!!! RAT is a no brainer when it comes to fundraising. Families, friends and the community are so willing to donate money to enrich literacy and education in our youth. It is such an easy ask that it is hard for anyone to say no. Most people dread fundraising and asking family or friends for support financially, but we had over 87% participation that were over the moon happy that we were reading to raise fund for our school. We would get emails and text message all week saying... My house is so quiet. Everyone is reading. Thank read-a-thin team for doing this fundraiser. Can we do the read-a-thon all year long, my child has never been so motivated to read in their life, but for a light up ring or Limo Lunch he can’t seem to put the books down. Thank you for all the support
Wow! Amazing! Engaging! For the last two weeks those have been the most common words we've heard! We are so excited about the results and the incredible support we received by our students, parents, friends, and local businesses. Kari Styne was amazing with her support...I don't think I ever waited more than 15 minutes for response to my questions...and I had many! We learned a lot as we went, and look forward to building from here. OUr first RAT and we raised OVER $53,000! Our goal was $12,000! Thank you and we look forward to the next one. As far as improvements or changes. Oh the minute logging was quite "creative". If only there was a better way to monitor that, but definitely a bit of a challenge. Ability to download daily reports into excel would be very helpful as well. We ran several daily goals, and transferring the information to track was a bit tedious. Otherwise, this was an excellently run website, support system. Thank RAT! I'm sure our Principal would love to provide a testimonial as well. Thank you from Immaculate Heart of Mary Elementary School, in Wilmington, DE.
Wonderful experience! The website was so easy to use. The kids LOVED the Read-A-Thon! Other than a couple of hiccups with the system we were extremely happy!! Thank you!!
This was such an easy (and successful!) fundraiser. Our rep, Tiffany, was so courteous and answered any questions right on the spot. We will definitely participate in this fundraiser again!
It was a great success as well as all the other years! We are so thankful for this opportunity that your company gives us. We look forward to doing business with you again next year!
Our Read-A-Thon was very successful! Started off with some organizational hiccups - 2 teachers were left out of our shipment and had a glitch with student info pulling correctly on a tracking page - other than that, very easy to manage and the kids had a blast. Thank you!
Read-A-Thon was an amazing experience. The students had so much fun and our students were so excited about reading! We surpassed our fundraiser goal and it was so easy! The program is so organized and carefully planned out. The read-a-thon team is available to answer every question along the way. We will definitely host another read-a-thon next year.
It went better than we hoped. It was so easy to set up and ran smoothly! Only problem we've heard is that when people had multiple kids, sometimes the email links for both kids wouldn't reach donors even though emails were entered correctly.
This was awesome! I will be highly recommending your company to next year's Fundraising Chair for the Cassingham Elementary PTO. Our parents and grandparents had very few problems logging in and donating. A few changes that I would like to see on your site. I'm sure that the functionality existed in your dash board, but I was not able to find it. A function that I really wanted to use was to find out the total of one individual student. Example, I wanted to be able to type in "Jane Doe" and see how much she had raised to date. The other functionality, that I would have liked was to see who had raised what per day. For instance, if we raised $1000 October 29th, I would have liked to have seen that $1000 broken out by each individual for just that day.
The Read-a-Thon went very well. It raised more money than I expected. I do think that the program is a bit cumbersome for some things. I feel that teachers and parents should not be able to add and delete students. Only the admin of the program. This causes issues and mistakes in regards to rewards and who has donated money. Also, I think that the way the rewards lists work should be a little more user friendly. Other than that, it was great!
Went great!
This is our 6th year holding a Readathon at our school. In all past years we have run the readathon ourselves using pamphlets and parent volunteers to log and count minutes. It's a lot of work but 100% of the proceeds went to our school. With Covid, we needed a digital platform and found Readathon.com. The sales pitch was very smooth and splashy so we thought the admin site would be too. We were a bit disappointed with the options- especially the marketing options. They are VERY crude and not what we're used to since several of our board members are graphic designers. However, at the end of the day your site helped us raise $5,000 more than we ever have and it's been nice for us not to have as much work. But with the marketing and prize gathering we put in on the backend it was still a lot more than we had hoped. Tiffany was wonderful to work with and extremely helpful and responsive to our questions and needs.
Read-A-Thon was a amazing way to get students to read and raise funds for the school! We have been amazed with our results and we look forward to doing it again next year.
This fundraiser exceeded any expectations we had prior to starting it!! We are blown away with the success of our Read-a-thon and we greatly appreciate the support we have received from our school families and community!
THIS IS MY 5TH YEAR DOING THIS AND RICHLAND'S 7TH YEAR. AND THIS YEAR HAS BEEN THE SMOOTHEST ONE YET. WE THANK YOU FOR ALL YOU DO FOR US AND TAKING THE TIME TO BE SO PATIENT WITH ME THIS YEAR. WE LOOK FORWARD TO WORKING WITH YOU GUYS AGAIN NEXT YEAR!!
For our first year we felt this went really well. Our staff liked that it didn't involve at lot of extra time on their end. We will be evaulating and gathering feedback for next year.
It went really well!! We polled our families and they prefer the Read-a-thon to other fundraisers. We chose the model with no prizes and came up with our own school wide intensives. It worked well. I loved the website you had. It was very easy to use!
Definitely some technical glitches but overall an easy process. I’d say the model of taking 25% is a bit high. Even with prizes. Not sure if we will continue given the large percentage we have to give up.
We reached our financial goals and supported our schools love of reading. We are very happy with our readathon.
This was our first Read-a-Thon and it went beautifully! We'll make some prize adjustments; but absolutely loved working with the Read-a-Thon team.
We've been amazed at the success of this fundraiser! We discontinued a fundraiser that made about $5000 and decided to try something new with read-a-thon. Our parents have LOVED it and we made over $20,000. They loved the emphasis on reading and encouraging academics. And it was easy to email grandparents and donors for support. We will definitely make this a yearly tradition!
It was wonderful!!
Thanks. The process was great overall.
We had a great time with the Read a Thon! It was INCREDIBLY easy to use, and we did all of our own events and prizes. The kids absolutely loved it, and we are so happy with how well it went
Our read a thon went very well. Thank you.
It has been another fantastic year for our Read-a-thon!
Another great year!
I think there could be improvements noted with your handouts and posters were not large enough. I think the individualized log in options can be very confusing. I think if there had been one blanket log in option that it would increase number of participants. I think the whole premise of the readathon is great! We have other schools in our district interested though.
We had a great Read-A-Thon!!
Thanks for another great fundraiser!
Everyone loves participating in the Read-a-thon!
The read a thon went even better than expected! We had some issues with people logging in and getting their kids registered, but overall it was great. We look forward to working with you again next year.
The Read-a-thon was excellent!
Our Read A Thon not only reached and surpassed our fundraising goal, it crushed it! We loved Reading and Raising together.
We had another fantastic Readathon this year! Thank you so much for your great service and website.
Another successful Read-A-Thon for Campbell Elementary! We love the focus this fundraiser puts on education and the simplicity of running the Read-A-Thon.
We LOVED Read-a-Thon — it was so easy and effective. We will definitely repeat this fundraiser for our schools!!
It was awesome! This was so easy for us to implement to make so much money that our school really needs this year. This is our second year with Read-a-thon and we raised way more money than we did the first year by following the instructions given to us by Tiffany. It was a wonderful experience!
We have done Read-a-thon for the past few years and love it.
My Read-a-Thon went very well. The only thing I would say needs improvement is the communication between the RAT rep and the campus administrator who is hosting the RAT at the campus. She did not really check on me throughout the process and this was my first time doing Read-a-Thon.
We loved it!
Our Read A Thon was a great success! The Read A Thon Fundraiser is a well thought out program and easy for our school to use. Read A Thon has great support and overall, I would recommend it to anyone who asked. The IT dept and customer service staff at Read A Thon were very helpful throughout the entire two weeks. Thank you! Lisa Hickenbottom Brandywine ES PTO
The Read-a-thon fundraiser was such a success for our school! We exceeded our goal of $20,000 and the students enjoyed all the reading time. We had mystery readers for the two weeks and two authors come speak to the students. It was truly an easy and enjoyable fundraiser!
Our students LOVED the Read-A-Thon! What a great way to raise funds... and as a double bonus - encourage reading! I've done many fundraisers, but this by far takes the blue ribbon!
I am beyond thrilled with hosting our first Read-a-Thon. This event raised abundantly more than any book fair could! Thank you for this wonderful opportunity for our school library.
This was a GREAT fundraiser!!! We were able to keep more money than we have compared to our other fundraisers, and family and friends loved to give because this was focused on reading!
I was very impressed with how quickly questions and concerns were answered by our Read a thon coordinator Tiffany. I loved how easy it was for parents and donators to sign on, and it was a great way for our school to be involved in something that had meaning.
Everything went well! Our school loved it.
Daulton's Read-a-Thon was a success! It was a positive experience for all. Thanks to Tiffany Alexander for always answering my questions and helping me through the process.
Our Read-a-Thon was wonderful! We had such encouraging feedback from parents, teachers, and staff!
Our school loved the Read-a-thon! I think a good parent should be able to create a username and password verse having a student code. A lot of our parents, creating more than on fundraising page for their kids because the student code email was going to their junk/spam folder. Some parents were not able to access their child’s fundraising page because of this which caused them not to bother. A family page would be nice so families that have 2 or more kids don’t have 2 fundraising pages that they are trying to log onto. With a family page, it could automatically divide pledges evenly among siblings. Overall, I feel like this platform was not the most user friendly which I believe caused us not to raise as much money as we could have.
Awesome! The set up and process are easy and I love all of the reporting that is available throughout the time frame. The staff is always SO helpful and quick to respond. Overall, it is really terrific. THANK YOU!
I loved the read-a-thon. It was very easy!
Our Read-a-thon was great! The kids and teachers loved it!
We have had great success raising funds with the Read-a-thon! This year we exceeded our goal by over $1500. We did miss being able to process checks through the Read-a-thon site this year, but have noted that change for next year. We also had some feedback from some parents regarding the grammar of the solicitation email that the site generates. They felt that it was too casual and the grammar errors were off putting. As an administrator, it would be nice to have a report by date that gave a more precise snapshot of that day- basically if you could have what is on the dashboard in a report form. It would really help us track if our advertising campaigns are working and data year to year. I resorted to pulling data from multiple reports to put together my own report, but it would save time on my end if it was an auto report option. I did find our customer service rep to be very responsive and helpful in correcting any issues we had. Thanks Tiffany!
Our Read-A-Thon was a great sucess! Our students were so motivated to read and we raised more than we anticipated! Things that you might do to improve: Add a way to track cash donations :)
We had a great Read-a-thon this year! We raised the most we have in 3 years. The Read-a-thon reps were very helpful trouble shooting a few little hiccups and always very responsive. It would be nice to be able to easily filter reports. It would also be nice to have additional information on donors- perhaps what state donations are coming from so that we could build in some additional challenges for our students. We have appreciated that the minimum donation amount was lower to $10. That makes a big difference to our school population.
Awesome experience!!! Looking forward to next year!
Great success. Easy, easy! Once suggestion would be to allow readers to donate a percentage of their donations for the online store to go back to school.
With very little prep work we launched Read-a-Thon. Within out first week we have received over $10,000! We ended up bringing in over $19,000 and our PTA is thrilled. We opted for the 75% track, so our students got to shop from their own online store and everyone is a winner! We are looking forward to returning to this fundraiser again next spring with even more prep work and communication with teachers, we know we can exceed this year's numbers. Thanks Readathon!
We LOVE Read-A-Thon! Everything is so convenient and simple to use. This is our second year using RAT and we will definitely continue to do so. We would love to be able to utilize Paypal as a payment option in the future.
Everything went very smoothly. The customer service was fantastic and always available to help.
This was awesome! Thank you
It was great--thank you!
This was such a fun, easy and amazing program! Thank you so much!
We are thrilled with the success of our Read-a-Thon event! Parents loved seeing their kids challenge themselves with a reading adventure and commented on how easy the system is to use. Our PTO organization is amazed at how much money we raised in such a short period of time. Tiffany, at Read-a-Thon, was extremely helpful throughout the whole process. This program is a win for everyone!
We loved the readathon! I was very easy to do and manage. However, the secret code for every student was a nightmare and not user friendly. We did find a way around that where students could link from the school page and then find their name under their teacher. But, other than that, it was great.
Great experience!
We love the Read-A-Thon. Our students read over 200,000 minutes and raising money while doing so is just icing on the cake. This is the easiest and most rewarding fundraiser our school has ever done. Thank you!
Our Read-A-Thon went great. It is an easy fundraiser with how it is set up.
it was great. i would love ideas to keep donation motivation up towards the middle/end when donating slowed.
We are very excited about how well we did! Thank you for all your support.
Thank you for all of your help and support. We will certainly do another Read-a-thon next year!
Read-a-thon far exceeded my expectations! Tiffany was friendly, professional and willing to answered all of my questions. Thank you Read-a-thon! MES PTA
The read a thon went great. I like the new dashboard. It was very easy to use.
We LOVED it! Your system is so easy to use, your staff is absolutely wonderful to work with - so responsive AND friendly. Highly recommend to any school looking for a new way to fundraise! The only reason we are not doing another RAT is simply because we usually do 1-2 years and change it up.
It has been an awesome event! So easy to participate. Anything to promote literacy while raising funds is a great thing!
Our Read-A-Thon was awesome! Our students really got into it, and our community support was amazing. We will definitely do this again in the future!
Our school loved participating in our first ever Read-a-thon! We got great, positive feedback from families, especially grandparents enjoying the touching messages and cheering their students on. We experienced a few glitches with the system where donation comments didn't go through but got amazing support and customer service from Kari at all times (even in the evening hours). Thank you, it was a fantastic fundraiser, especially under the circumstances!
Our school loved participating in our first ever Read-a-thon! We got great, positive feedback from families, especially grandparents enjoying the touching messages and cheering their students on. We experienced a few glitches with the system where donation comments didn't go through but got amazing support and customer service from Kari at all times (even in the evening hours). Thank you, it was a fantastic fundraiser, especially under the circumstances!
This was an amazing experience. It was a great way to promote reading, school spirit, and community involvement. Your company had everything organized so well. We chose not to go with the prize option. The time read to earn a prize did not seem realistic. We are excited to hold this event again next school year. Thank you!!
Our Read-a-Thon was awesome! The teachers, students, and parents loved it! It was super easy to run and the customer service was outstanding!!
Thank you for making the process so smooth! Our kids had a great time with the read-a thon!
Yes the teachers appreciated the event and we were happy to raise money in a positive way. A few concerns were the prize levels were high for many of our participants.
This may be available already but an FAQ would be great to have regarding simple questions. Overall we had a great experience so far with this fundraiser and we will certainly do it again!! Thank you.
This was an amazing experience! We are thrilled with how easy it was to use the site and how it was all set up. The only issue we ran into was the site lagging behind causing people to add double minutes by clicking to many times. This was important as we were running a contest for most minutes read. Other than that it was wonderful!
Thank you for allowing me to continue the readathon for purposes of tracking minutes, even though donations stopped. It was helpful for students to keep striving for prizes with their reading minutes.
This was our most successful read-a-thon ever. Thank you for a program that is easy for us to run and fun for our families to participate in!
It certainly met my expectations but I would like to hear from the school how they think it went. We had a rough start so I think we would have had higher participation if we had started a week sooner and we may rethink it over the holiday's. But we met our fundraising goals and got so close to meeting our reading participation goal.
This was our first time doing a read-A -Thon it was a huge success we will definitely be doing this again next year! We may change the time frame and do it in the Fall and hopefully get more teachers to participate.
We have participated in the Read-A-Thon for multiple years and have found this fundraiser to be the easiest and the most fruitful of any we have used in our 37 year history. We completely recommend it to every school!
This was our first experience with a read-a-thon and we are thrilled with the outcome! It will certainly become an annual event/fundraiser at our school. Thank you so much for all of the support!
Above expectations.
Above expectations.
I really liked the Read-A-Thon. It was very easy to use and the customer service was very responsive to questions. My only comment is to improve the prize center a little bit. A lot of the prizes seem a little babyish for elementary school kids - especially the older ones.
Our read-a-thon went well. This is our third year and this year and last year were about the same. The first year we did much better. The first year had several business sponsors. Since you raised the minimum amount our businesses rather give us the money directly and advertise with us because it is more affordable. $250 for a small business is a lot. We will continue to do a read-a-thon because we believe in the no sell approach when it comes to fundraising and prefer the enrichment aspect of the read-a-thon.
We had a fantastic Read-a-thon. Thank you so much for all your support.
This was an amazingly easy fundraiser for our school! Our goal was to raise $10,000 and we surpassed that!
Fabulous program just like last year!
This has been a great way for our school to continue to fund raise during these challenging times.
Our students and staff love the Read-A-Thon fundraiser. Not only do we raise money for our school but the students get excited and competitive about reading.
We had so much fun during our Read-A-Thon!
This was Gordon Elementary's first ever Read-A-Thon and we could not be more pleased. The fact that the program was all online is a huge plus and the personalized material made the program easy to launch. We had about 70% participation from our students which makes this a great start for our first year! As a school we were able to focus on the reading aspect as we tied this into our school book fair - fantastic. There were some learnings along the way, but again - that's to be expected for the first year. Thank you for all quick responses to our questions and for helping us run a successful event!
Everything was made so easy for us! I believe that adding printable certificates for top readers, largest amount raised, etc. would bring it up to the next level. Educators are always using certificates.
Great support. Thank you for being there for us to answer all our questions and to walk us through everything.
This Read-a-thon was awesome and the results created an amazing experience that will be very memorable and rewarding! Our Teachers, Readers, Parents, and Sponsors loved how their reading habits picked up, not just for prizes and rewards, but also to pick up a random book and immerse their imaginations in travel, animal life, and stories they could relate with. Overall, Read-a-thon was one of the best fundraisers we’ve ever done, and will do again. Thank you Kari for being with the Kyrene de la Esperanza PTO throughout this event!!! The only complaint during this event was some had payment issues, and some resolved those issues on their own and others just gave up. We would like to understand why and how to overcome these problems in the future.
We were very happy with this year's read-a-thon, as we raised over $12,000 for our school! The kids really enjoyed logging their minutes and several students developed solid reading habits as a result of their participation.
Our Read-a-thon rep, Kari Styne, was great - knowledgeable, responsive, patient, professional! And the tools offered by the RAT sight are excellent. Our printed materials came quickly and were very accurate. It was a very positive experience and one I would recommend for other schools. I had thought the Photo Showcase would be more of an incentive but didn't realize only teachers could submit photos. It didn't get much traction for us, was just one more thing for teachers to manage. We'll try to handle that differently next year.
It would save us a lot of time if the coupons the kids receive were more customizable. I had to print on top of the coupons that were sent to us because the coupons didn't match what our teachers requested, so I had to choose a generic prize coupon. Another option would be to expand the choices available. I would also like see an app that parents can use on their phones which would be more user friendly. Overall, the ease of parents and families to pay in a secure way online was exceptional, the accessibility to use paypal as an option to pay was big. I have done a "manual or by hand" read a thon years ago and this was FAR easier, less maintenance and work and we raised more money. The amount that was kept by the company was a bit much for the services they provided, a lot parent complaints about the amount kept by company. Reports from the teachers view were confusing, user friendly dashboard for each teacher would be nice and they would participate more. We may look for a company that keeps less amount, has an app and is more user friendly for the teachers to use on a daily basis for next year. Thank you all for your service for this year. I hope to see you guys do more improvements by the time our read a thon comes around next year to make it worth it for us to use your service again. Not sure yet if we will use you again, we will see what upgrades and a better balance of money kept by company for next year.
The only issue this year with COVID would have been the ability to ship prizes directly to the students. Its unfortunate your company couldn't accommodate this as it has been a logistical nightmare for myself in trying to provide times for prize pickup for registering and now all prizes will be sent via egift cards because your prize option couldn't accommodate shipping directly to the reader. Other than that each year we get more participation from our teachers and our students/community. We didn't raise more money than last year but about the same.
This was a great fundraising event for us. Read-a-thon made it so easy. Compared to our other fundraisers this was hands down the easiest. We didn't need a ton of volunteers to make it happen. Having a mobile app would be a great enhancement to this program.
We were absolutely amazed with this program. We made way more than we thought and it was easy on our end. Thank you so much. I do think it would be nice to end the donations at the same time as the read -a-thon so we would be able to get our money sooner.
Our school had a great experience and it was a success!
We are very pleased with our Read a thon! It was easy to facilitate with the materials provided by the company.
We loved our first Read A Thon and plan to make this an annual fundraiser for our elementary school! The students were so excited and loved logging their minutes!
Was a great platform once everyone figured out how to use it (teachers/parents). Still are not sure it's worth losing 20% of our funds, however.
This has been a great easy fundraiser to do while lots of families are virtual. Thanks for making it easy!
This is P.S. 116's second year using Read-a-thon.com and we love the convenience and user-friendly features!
We loved it! It was so easy!
It went well. Everyone was very helpful and answered our questions. It will be helpful from the back end to search students individually and also have pages with total reading minutes for the entire school.
We had an awesome read a thon. We raised 14,000. I was unaware of the extra recess incentive. I may have selected that, but was not aware. It ended up being a great incentive, but I may use it differently next year!I may set a goal for the read a thon and then all students will receive an extra recess if we meet the goal.
This was a fantastic experience! The students and supporters love it!
This is our third year doing a Read-a-thon and we love it. The teachers love how easy it is, and it can be run by one person!
The tools are easy to use. I would have like to see a few more columns in the reports for teachers--Title
It was a good year again! We did better last year, but Hurricane Irma definitely hindered our fundraising. We will do a Read-A-Thon again next year!
The Read-a-thon was Fabulous! My Contact Tiffany was absolutely amazing to work with! And the system/program was a dream. Thank you so much for helping us with a successful Fundraiser option this year!
Read-A-Thon was so easy, so efficient, and surpassed our expectations!! We are so happy with how it turned out, and how accessible this fundraiser was to all students.
The Readathon staff, site, and tools really made our Readathon easy, both for administrators and families. I love the real-time dashboard and student/teacher reports. I used them daily (usually multiple times). Our liaison, Kari, was friendly, responsive, and very professional. I personally used the email and social media tools (Facebook in particular), which I did not do as a parent last year. It was easy, AND we saw results beyond my expectations! Our biggest challenge is getting parents to go to the site, register, and USE all the great tools (we do have a number of parents for whom English is a second language, and there may be some cultural barriers we need to overcome...more research needed on both fronts for us!). If you have advice there or "best practices," please let us know.
North Shore Academy’s Read-a-Thon went very well, we raised 11K of our 15K Goal ????. We exceeded last years Goal o. We are hoping over the next few days that the remaining $4000 will be donated. Thank you for your support.
We had a great time with the Read-a-Thon and it went very well for our school! The kids had a blast, the teachers were involved, and it was so easy for us to manage thanks to the website and dashboard. Thank you!
Would love to have had the reminder sheets to be 'live' so that only those who have not created their page set up reminder sheets will print out--otherwise that is a waste of paper and time to sort through for those students that are needing the reminder.
It was fantastic! The kids had a wonderful time, we raised a lot more than last year! The daily incentives really made the difference!
What a wonderful way to earn dollars but more importantly it gives our students and families the opportunity to read together and encourage everyone to read.
It went great! Easy and encourages reading wonderful will def do again!
This is our 2nd year. What an easy and great fundraiser!
The R.A.T. was an easy way to fundraise and get the word out that our students love to read. The real time information is an excellent feature. Being able to email, text, and post via social media that our R.A.T. is happening is an added bonus. There's no need to physically track anything. Having a coordinator to keep us on track, answer questions, and provide support is very helpful and useful. The biggest disappointment was the functionality of the webpage when donating. There is a complete disconnect after a donor provides payment information. Many donors including myself did not get email receipts and did not have an opportunity to post messages to the reader(s). Sometimes when this info was entered the website would not save the info and allow submission. It just stalled and froze. This technical problem needs to be resolved as some donors were unsatisfied, including myself because the children enjoy reading the encouraging messages and motivated them.
We enjoyed it but hoped for a better outcome. It didn’t do as well as we hoped for, but we still really enjoyed doing it. Maybe if there was more promoting help or even an assembly where somebody came out to get the kids excited like (apex or fun run). We would like to give it another try in the future I think, thank you for all the help and a chance to participate in this program.
Great program! I liked the improvements to the site from last year.
We had a great experience with RAT! The support from Tiffany was amazing! Off the top of my head, the only thing I can think of to improve the process would be 1)to have a printed page of a more detailed explanation of the process for teachers that they can read. They were a bit confused. 2) To have the Parent introduction letter already printed and put in the packet and to have it translated to Spanish. 3) Make it easier to enter the reading log minutes manually for the administrator. I had to enter students' minutes and it was very tedious. 4) It was not clear from the beginning who was responsible for providing the actual prizes (not the coupon or voucher to receive one). It seemed a bit misleading. Other than that, we really enjoyed this fundraiser and look forward to doing it again next year! Thanks so much, RAT!
This was much better than shutting the library down for a book fair.
This was our first Read-A-Thon that went extremely well! We are so proud of our Dolphin Readers and I expect that we will have another Read-A-Thon again. Way to Go Cedar Road Elementary School!
This was such a successful event. Read-a-thon makes fundraising so much easier!
Our read-a-thon went very well! A couple things: Would you be able to enter email addresses for all participants at the start? Also would it be possible to provide a custom flyer or poster through your website? Maybe you could provide a template? Also, being able to edit the language in the readers personal page would be a great feature. Thank you!
The best fundraiser that promotes literacy and love of reading while building community. Our 1st Annual Read-a-thon raised almost $13,500 while our children read almost 100,000 minutes, in class and at home over two weeks!
Our RAT went better this year (our 2nd year) as we went above
Unbelievable how easy this fundraiser was to take part in. The materials, both print and digital, were professional and engaging. It truly runs itself!
I think it went really well!
We love the Read a thon. So easy, and successful every time. Thank you
This was our first read-a-thon, and the community seemed to really enjoy it.
We were pleased with the Read-A-Thon and how easy it was to set-up and edit/add students or provide codes to parents who misplaced theirs. It's wonderful to see the comments that parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and friends leave for the little readers they are supporting!
Our read-a-thon was much more successful this year over last year.
This was a fun and easy fundraiser! Thanks so much for your assistance. We raised money for our school while the kids did what they love to do....READ!
We loved our first experience with Read-a-thon! We were impressed with our promotional box and how organized it was explaining step by step what we had to do. We most definitely do it again :)
Thanks for making this so easy!
This was our first time doing a read-a-thon at our school, and it was a great success! To promote literacy and a love for reading, AND raise funds for our school, is a winning combination!
Love how easy the read-a-thon is to facilitate in our elementary school.
This is our school's second read-a-thon. This year we increased participation from students from 38% last year to 50% this year. All of our teachers supported this fundraiser this year (not all did last year). We exceeded the goal we made monetarily this year. Read-a-thon customer service is the absolute best. Thank you for the support from beginning to end.
We had an amazing Read-A-Thon. It ran itself. Thank you
Went much better than expected! Ran smoothly . The tools from the Readathon team really helped us launch and roll with this fundraiser. We intend to make this an annual thing!
There needs to be some other way to make kids accountable about their reading. There was also one reader who was able to enter a lot of minutes at the end, too many minutes to have been read on a school day. Otherwise everything was great!
It was great, look forward to doing it again next year!
Ours did ok. I feel as though the current conditions have but a huge hurt on it.
It was amazing! Better than we expected!
it was amazing. It was super easy to use and a great way to raise funds. Our only suggestion would be to have a way to turn off minutes prior to the official start. We started getting kids signed up a week before and they immediately started logging minutes which made it a little difficult to keep track of who was actually the top class and readers.
This was a fabulous fundraiser. I appreciate how all of the papers came grouped together by teacher. Super easy!!
The kids had a great time with our Read-a-Thon! The parents and teachers love not having to gather cash. And the kids are excited about reading and the Spirit Days! All while raising money to buy more books! It's been great, thank you for offering this service and having great customer service. The easy to use website has been great! I have made morning announcements giving the kids updates on the highest reading classes and students, the highest earning classes and students -- I can hear them cheering from their classrooms! So great! And I couldn't have done that without the easy Reports and tallies you offer! Thank you!!
We loved the read-a-thon and it was a great success for our school. This will definitely be an annual fundraiser for our school. The customer service was incredible and loved dealing with the people at read-a-thon. The students took such a big interest in the reading and that is a success all be itself. The website was extremely user friendly and I can’t think of anything that would make it better. Thank you Starkbrights!
We have loved the Read-a-thon. It's great seeing students excited to read! Thank you.
So easy and wonderful. Teachers, students and parents loved it!
The Read-a-thon went better than we could have ever imagined. Kids were reading and excited about it. We were able to make a lot of money for our school in a very short amount of time with very little work on our part. I would recommend to anyone looking for ways to motivate kids to read and if your school needs money.
First time - loved it!
We had hoped to reach $15,000
Our Lady of Hope Catholic Academy did the Read-a-Thon for the first time this year. We did not know what to expect but was truly surprised by the outcome. We raised $8800 for our school and it was the easiest fundraiser we ever did! The children enjoyed reading while contributing to a fundraiser for their school. They enjoyed the ability to shop for prizes with their earnings. We look forward to doing another Read-a-Thon!
Our school loves this fundraiser!! Who doesn’t want to support kids reading?? This was our most successful fundraiser yet and it was so easy to do. Thank you!!
I love this RAT program because it can be tailored to fit our exact needs from the timeline to the prize structure. I am wondering why you do not offer a pay-per-minute option though. I had quite a few parents asking about that and missing that feature. Thanks, and until next time! ~Sarah Lee RAT Chair
We loved our Read-a-Thon. The kids read so much and we raised over 11,000 even though we are a small school! We will definitely participate in another Read-a-thon!
This is our 3rd year in a row using Read-A-Thon as a fundraiser for our school. We can't be more happy with how easy it is to use, also how much money we've raised each time, and lastly how reading is stressed to the students and parents. If you are using any other fundraiser you should stop immediately and switch to Read-A-Thon. You will not be disappointed.
Easy set up. Prize selection could be better but overall pretty good! Easy to collect donations. Easy to send reminders. Easy to stop. Over all 10/10 Would recommend.
Our Read a Thon was a huge success once again! Thank you so much for the opportunity to encourage reading AND raise money. It's a win-win situation because all students can participate even if they are unable to collect donations.
The Read-A-Thon was by far the most COVID friendly option for fundraising for our school. We set a goal of 30,000 minutes read as a school, and our students read more than 85,000!!! The funds will go to helping our students feel a bit more normalcy as we can provide events in a safer way now.
We loved the Read-a-Thon! Our students were so motivated to read and excited about raising money for our school! The whole platform was so easy to use, and customer support was always available and very helpful. Thank you so much.
Hilltop loves Read-A-Thon. Our students and staff get so excited about reading and raising money for our school! Th
I appreciate all the help. It is hard to manage the site through the phone and it takes a long time to load most pages which eats my battery even if I’m in WiFi. Everything else was great!
This was a GREAT 1st Read-a-thon!! Thank you so much for all the printouts and videos. The only thing that I would suggest would be a Thank You letter that could be printed after the event to send to parents and also a printout that promotes the gifts that the kids get. Many of our parents did not understand this part and a printout would have been wonderful. Thank you all so much!!
I think our first time doing the Read-a-thon went fairly well. The website is simple to use and we love having the ability for our students to collect online donations. We also really like getting away from the pledge and then collect model. Knowing that when the fundraiser is over, it is over and we know how much we have is a great feeling. No more hounding parents and supporters to send in their pledged amount.
We had an amazing Read-A-Thon! This was my first time hosting a Read-A-Thon and I will definitely be holding one next school year. Thank you for making this so easy to run.
Our Read-A-Thon was a huge success again this year! Thank you so much for this great opportunity! It is a great way to encourage reading
Loved doing this as a fundraiser....easiest fundraiser ever!!
Love the Read-A-Thon.
This was a great experience overall! We'll definitely use you again. The only feedback we have to offer would be to improve the quality and age appropriateness of the prizes. There really wasn't anything for the older kiddos.
This was a phenomenal read-a-thon process. So thankful for all of the assistance I received learning how to use your program. Our teachers and students are so thankful for how much Read-a-thon has done for our school, Leo Croce!!
Read-a-Thon offers a lot of support and the dashboard makes it very easy to use. The mobile sites are very functional as well.
It went great. Even though we didn't meet our goal we were so close. Thank you Oaklawn PTO
The read-a-thon went well. We raised 1,400 hundred more than last year.
Went really great!! Several thing surrounding kids inflating their hours read that I would like to change. The edit your reading sessions should be only the dates that our even is going on they should not be able to add dates prior to when our event starts. Additionally, we should be able to limit the amount of hours read per day. Also, their edits/and daily entries should have timestamps on them so that we can see when they entered and if they sat down one day and entered extra reading for the past week or two. When you have prizes at the school for reading minutes and you have little to no way to verify cheating it can create a challenge.
All good. Yes we will do another.
Things went well, but the reader/parent interface was not user friendly and many parents were put off by the immediate push to Facebook (an option to post there is fine, but presenting FB as if it were a requirement to activate the reader account turned many of our parents away). We would consider using Read-A-Thon again only if the Reader/Parent interface is updated and streamlined, and the push to Facebook is removed.
THANKS SO MUCH!! WE LOVE THIS!!
Easy to use. We will add this as a yearly fundraiser for sure.
All was awesome!
We found the online system to be very friendly. As an administrator we would love more freedom in running a variety of reports (for example , weekly totals by reader).
The whole program went really well. We were very happy with the process.
The Read-A-Thon went very smoothly for our school. The students, staff, and school community were supportive of the event. The Read-A-Thon staff was very responsive to any questions that we had, and they gave us answers in a timely manner. It really sparked an interest in reading and provided great support for reading from our school community.
It went well ! Our Rep Tiffany Alexander was so much help !!
The Read a Thon has been a wonderful way to encourage our students to read
This was one of the BEST fundraisers we have ever done. Both teachers and parents alike loved that it encouraged our students to READ! We surpassed our fundraising and school wide minutes goals. The students are so incredibly proud of their achievement. Your site was so easy to use...it really is as simple as 1, 2, 3. Our documents were delivered promptly, the website is user friendly, the reporting was a life saver, and the constant feedback from my personal service agent was great. We loved it!
Our school is so excited about the results of our Read-a-thon! It was simple and the kids had a great time! It's is a total Win-Win!
This is a great fundraiser, and a good return on the money. I like that the kids get to spend a portion what they earn. We have a $5.00 store by us, so the $5.00 and up prizes could be a little better. Also our kids are older and a lot of the prizes are geared toward the elementary ages. The reporting tool was very simple. I liked the real time reporting. We could not get the read a thon website link to work, so it was hard to send out to parents. A link that would let the sponsor search for their kid would be nice.
Read a thon was super easy to use and was a simple fundraiser to facilitate at our school. It didn't require any volunteers and raised over $10,000!
Its the easiest fundraiser! So intuitive and simple for parents and teachers to add minutes and for family and friends to donate.
Wonderful experience. We seem to do better each year. Thank you for providing us with this opportunity.
What a great and EASY fundraiser this is! Thank you Read-A-Thon! Superb customer service and a fundraiser that actually encourages our reading goals! Love it!
The read-a-thon went very well. This was our first year doing it and it exceeded our expectations. The program it very easy to set up and use. We will be making this an annual fundraiser for our school.
love this! so easy
This is our second RAT, and it was just a great as the first. We will continue our fundraising with your company. Thanks for making it easy and fun!!!!
This was our second Read-A-Thon and it was extremely successful and so simple to do! We will have our third Read-A-Thon next year! We highly recommend it!
Very smoothly, just like years past. And great support help from our rep. She checked in occasionally and was always ready if we needed anything. Thank you!
Thank you for this excellent program! Kari Styne was incredibly patient and helpful and I am so grateful to her. Thank you!
Thank you for this excellent program! Kari Syine was incredibly patient and helpful and I am so grateful to her. Thank you!
Wonderful experience for our students and a great fundraiser for our Library.
It went well. I wish the website was cell phone friendlier. The reports would be nice if you kept track of the grade as well since we do prizes for those who read the most in each grade and it takes forever to go back and forth to figure out the grade the teachers are in.
We raised over $10,000.00 for our school and the kids had a great time competing for most minutes read. Our kids read close to 200,000 minutes for the 10 day period which exceeded our goal of 100,000. This was a great program and a very easy fundraiser to conduct.
We enjoyed using this website to promote, communicate and excite our Readers. I would like the option to customize and select our Minimum donation. The global $10 reduced our total sponsorship and in California things are so expensive and with the % taken by Read-a-thon we need to generate funds of over $10K. I would like reports to identify emails successfully sent. I would like to maintain dual emails, as we have cases where grandparents are involved in the caring of the kids during the day or parents are divorced as well and need dual communication. Thanks again!
We loved the online option! All of your employees were kind and helpful. You made our job easy! Thank you!
The Read-A-Thon is the simplest and most effective way to hold a fundraiser! The staff are very helpful and go above and beyond to help any school be successful. Don't use any other company but them!
We really enjoy the Read-A-Thon. Thank you for making it so seamless to run with our school. The only suggestion I would make is to have the report by last name, first initial. We use a model where the families that raise a certain amount get a grand prize so it makes it cumbersome to comb through the reports this year. Otherwise, everything is great!
This was our school's first year to participate in Read-a-thon and it has been a great experience! Your computer system is very user friendly - for the administrator, teachers and readers. One of the great things about this fundraiser is that you can raise thousands of dollars with just one volunteer, the administrator. Most other fundraisers our school has done in the past require a lot of volunteers to raise an equivalent amount of money. The parents and family members of the readers also love the fact that children are learning while they raise money. Thank you!!
This is my third time doing a Read-a-Thon and I love the ease of it. This is our most successful one to date!
This was such an easy fundraiser. Everything is so easily laid out.
Our Read-a-Thon went pretty well, considering we had to complete the second week from home due to the Covid virus. The kids had a great time, and really enjoyed reading! Thank you to all of the Read-a-thon employees who answered all of our questions along the way- you made this such a simple and easy-to-use fundraiser!
This is our first time using this company to do a fundraiser for the school's PTA. We enjoyed it; it was simple and easy to use.
The most exciting part was to see the current status of the effort. It helped us stay motivated to reach our school goal. Wich we did!
We met our goal! The kids read more than we ever imagined and we were kinda surprised that we raised as much as we did!
We loved our experience with Read-A-Thon! Thanks for making fundraising so easy!
One of the easiest fundraisers out there, we love it!
We did amazing with our Read a Thon!! We will definitely be doing this next year!! Thank you!!
Easy and interactive- appreciate the flyers and reminders. We had a problem with language we’d like to let you know about. About 50% of our students are Spanish speaking. 1. School district policy is that English/Spanish translation is the same. Thank you for putting Spanish on the back, but it has to be in color. 2. Wristbands need translation. 3. Posters need translations.
Thank you for providing a fabulous, fun, and easy fundraising experience.
We thoroughly enjoyed our Read-A-Thon and I would like to thank you all for creating this platform for us to raise money for our school.
This was our second Read-a-Thon and we loved it! So easy and the support we received was wonderful! The only suggestion we would have, is adding a line about accepting cash donations at school that can be credited to reader accounts.
Awesome experience!
I loved the data you offered. It would have been very helpful to target students that created a page but didn’t share it out. I wanted that data. I wanted to message just those people. I also wanted a few more options for pre-written messages. A possible big change- many of our parents use texting much more than email. We would have reached more people if we could text them instead of just email. Could you possibly collect phone numbers during page creation as well as email addresses?
The read a thon was very successful. We had some technology difficulties when using a mobile device but nothing we couldn't work around. Thank you for your support
This read a thon was absolutely amazing!!! We loved your company and so thankful we found you! Everyone loved the way they could have their own page and keep track! Our teachers wished they could use this system all year round to keep track of their kiddos! So thank you!!!!
We enjoyed the Book-A-Thon! We met our goal and the students loved the reading sessions. This was our first Read-A-Thon and we brainstormed ideas to help us be even more excited next year.
We had a very positive experience with this Read-A-Thon and will plan to do it again next year!
We enjoyed the Read-A-Thon. Our school is very happy with the support for our students and the reading programs our PTO will be able to provide as a result of our generous sponsors. Thank you to the Read-A-Thon company and all of the students, parents and families that helped support our goals.
We had a phenomenal turnout for our Read A Thon! The experience was great and pretty easy to manage. The only hinderance was for people who did not have online accessibility but we did send out some forms for cash donations and collected an additional $550! Thanks to all the support and the personalization forms for each child is what makes the difference, it made parents stop and read the paperwork we sent home. Excellent program, would totally recommend it to other groups!
Our first Read-a-Thon was great. It was easy to start, run and end it. When I have questions customer service was very helpful. I wish there was a way for my school to write a check for cash donations. We have a large population of parents who do not speak English they don't have Facebook, twitter or email. I know they would have donated cash if they could. Our school district is strict about how we deal with money and our school could only send cash donations to Read-a-Thon with a check but I was told you only accepted pay pal or credit cards.
This was a wonderful experience for our school and our students.
This year was our third year and our best year yet!
We had a really great time doing the Read-a-thon. Everything was very easy to do. I wish I could have printed a report that showed me minutes they read at home, minutes from their teacher and minutes from admin. I wanted to reward students who read at home. Next year we are going to try the prizes embedded. Thank you for such a great fundraiser, so many of our kids loved reading and it motivated them.
The read-a-thon went great. The glitches we've had in the past with the online interface have been improved and it was easy to use. Our school loves this fundraiser. We will likely do it again next year. Thanks! Cindy Pedrioli Green Gables Elementary PTA
This was so much fun for our readers! We were surprised by their motivation and even more surprised by the generous donations of our families.
We are ecstatic with the results of this read-a-thon! Not only did we raise more money than we could have ever imagined, but the students enjoyed the experience and the read-a -thon team couldn't have been more helpful! This was by far one of the best--if not, THE BEST fundraiser we have ever participated in!
We raised so much more money than we anticipated! This was so easy and great. We will definitely do a read a thon again!
This fundraiser was so easy to implement and so motivating for our students! We'll definitely do this again!
Love this easy to use fundraiser. I highly recommend other schools to use this read-a-thon program
We have really enjoyed the Read-a-Thon! We have had students of all grade levels spending more time than average digging into books, and the no-cost and low-cost incentives we used were really fun for the kids (and teachers). Everyone has found this to be a huge success for our readers. It was recommended that your company consider creating an app for parents to use. For parents with multiple students, it was quite a bit of work logging in and out each day into the various accounts, so a parent suggested an app with preset reading amount buttons (20 minutes, 30 minutes, etc.) that would allow them to click on their student's name, then the amount of time.
This was a great easy way to earn money for our school. Thank you!
This was such an easy fundraiser! Exceeded our expectations financially and reading goals!
Great.
Thank you for making it easy to manage this fundraiser at the school.
I think that the read-a-thon went really well over all. I had a few kids who had issues logging their minutes, but they were few and far between. I think that the cash donations we receive should be totaled and then deducted from what is sent to us, instead of requiring a credit card or check to make the donation. It just seems like a lot of work on both ends to manage that.
This read-a-thon was an AMAZING fundraiser for our school! It was so easy to set up and run. We will definitely be using your company again next spring!
It was very tech-friendly, and both Stephanie and Kari were helpful. Thank you,
This was our first Read-a-Thon and it exceeded my expectations! Parents sent emails/text about how much they loved this form of fund raising compared to fundraisers in the past. We will definitely participate in Read-a-Thons in the future.
Everything went great, one comment I would make is that on the paperwork that is sent including dates of the event. I didn't realize it wasn't on there so it was a bit confusing for parents. Otherwise we look forward to doing this again!
The whole process was easier than I expected it to be and we raised more money than I ever thought we would. If your school is looking for a way to raise money without being burdened with a lot of details and extra work, I highly recommend you give this a try.
Another great Read-a-thon! Thank you for providing such an easy way to raise funds for our worthwhile cause. It's great to not have to handle any money, to get kids excited about reading and to provide us with all the tools needed in one handy place.
I am more and more pleased each year with Read A Thon. Our students and parents love this fundraiser!
this was a great motivator for our students to read and track their reading activities! The benefit of not having to sell product was an added bonus!
Every aspect of the Read-A-Thon was great!
We had a slow start but once the teachers started promoting, it went very well. We did have quite a few readers report issues getting their secret codes; it would have been helpful to have the secret code look-up live but I gather our event ran just before that feature was implemented. We also had a few parents report issues posting encouraging messages to their readers; that issue was never resolved, which is a little disappointing.
The support for this event from Tiffany was wonderful. Thank you.
I love this easy to use and quick fundraiser. Our top 3 readers with sponsors received a KINDLE! I find that if you provide incentives along the way, students are super excited and more willing to participate. For the second year in a row, we raised over $9,000.00. The money that comes back to us is being saved for new and replacement playground equipment.
It was an amazing experience for all of our kids!!!!
This was our first year doing a Read-a-thon, and we couldn't be happier with the outcome. It was easy to setup and communicate with teachers and readers. It would be great if there was a way to set multiple goal settings for each student, class, or school in regards to how many minutes to read or how much to raise.
Our Read-A-Thon went smooth, especially during this time of school at home. It was a great easy, virtual fundraiser that was minimal effort aside from social media and email posts. The only comment we had from anyone within our student body was that the requests for money from parents was worded and made certain people feel as though they were being called a not so great parent if they didn't donate more money. They page that says "Most Parents, Superhero Parents, Super Star Parent, etc". Our PTA as a whole who hosted the Read-A-Thon felt as though it was a very user friendly and easy to run fundraiser. Thank you, Miranda
The Read-A-Thon was a great event for our school and students. Students were motivated to read and earn prizes.
This was a very easy fundraiser to do and we look forward to doing it again.
We love this fundraiser! The only challenging part is setting up the picture...it often doesn’t center and turns sideways.
It was great to have no money pass hands. Everyone was on a credit card. It was fun to see the total everyday. My only suggestion would be the prizes. We had a lot of certificates and only 3 prizes. The pen could be better quality. Kids said it didn't work after a day.
It was great to have no money pass hands. Everyone was on a credit card. It was fun to see the total everyday. My only suggestion would be the prizes. We had a lot of certificates and only 3 prizes. The pen could be better quality. Kids said it didn't work after a day.
It was an easy and fun experience!
This was an AMAZING event and can't wait for next year!
This was a wonderful and successful fundraiser for our school. We received lots of positive feedback from staff, parents and students. We plan to run this again in the fall as our main fundraiser for the year! Very impressed
This was a fantastic fundraiser for us! Thank you!!
Read-A-Thon is great! It's an easy fundraiser and best of all, it gets our students reading.
The read-a-thon went very well! It exceeded our expectations for the first one. We will definitely be doing another one in the future. It was super easy and our rep Tiffany was very helpful!
This went really well. Kari was amazing, as she always is. My only negative comment is that the prizes were not so great this year so I feel like we should have been warned as I might have changed our prize option.
another great event, thanks
Our Read-A-Thon we a great experience this year. It is such an easy fundraiser to do, while promoting Reading!
Our first attempt at Read-A-Thon was a great success! During the pandemic we needed a fundraiser that didn’t require volunteers or selling merchandise. This was perfect. It was very simple to set up and easy to use during the fundraiser. Support was fantastic. The option of sharing information online and using all the RAT prompts were invaluable. We are so happy to have tried it and will definitely do another one next year!
I have mixed feedback about the new prize model. I liked that prizes were given concurrently with the read a thon. However, I did not like the lack of prizes. I have struggled greatly to come up with enough prizes on my own, and it's eating into our profit more as a result. Also, I really would like you to keep this year's records for our school so we can plan better for next year. I would love to see how many supporters we had, what the mean donation was, and how many donations were at the $25, $100, etc. It would be very helpful for next year's planning.
Love Read-A-Thon!!
Our read a thon was so smooth! The kids had a blast and was one of most successful fundraisers!
The Read-a-thon was a good fundraiser, however this time around our teachers were not able to use their dashboard properly nor receive the emails. Found out that the emails were entered wrong on most of the teachers. Thank you for all your support throughout.
Our school loved it! We would probably have another READ-A-THON EOY! The only feedback is to give sponsors a choice to remain anonymous or not while submitting their comment
This was definitely a success. We doubled and then some our donations from last year. I would say that’s a success!!
I have been pleasantly surprised at how well our read-a-thon did at our school. We had approximately 38% of students participate. We exceeded my personal goal of $5800. The staff was great to work with and the supplies were awesome. This is by far the best fundraiser I’ve personally contributed to. We are changing of the guards this year at our PTO, but I would chair this event again in a heartbeat for our school.
Another great year...thank you!
Our first Read-A-Thon went much better than expected. We are so excited to have our scholars read more and raise money for our school in the process. The RAT team made it extremely simple, and now that we have completed our first one, we can definitely say it will not be our last. Thank you RAT team!
We use Read-a-Thon every year to fund our Accellerated Reader progrom. It is easy and fun for the students. Cyndi A. Springmyer Elementary School Secretary
Wonderful Experience!
We love the Read-A-Thon format. The Read-A-Thon team makes fundraising easy, from the printed materials to the support from your awesome Staff! Our kids love that they get to choose their own prizes. This is our second year and we exceeded have our fundraising goal each year!!!
It was great. Although our numbers were not what I was hoping for-it was a very busy couple of weeks. Now that we know what to expect, we will set up committees and greatly improve our numbers next year. :)
This is our very first Read-A-Thon and it was such a fantastic experience! The Read-A-Thon team was awesome and so very helpful, always available to answer questions. Our school had a fun time reading, what a great way to raise money! Thank you for the opportunity and look forward to doing it again next year.
This was our second Read-a-Thon and we did better this year than we did last year!
This is our 2nd year to participate and we LOVE it! It is so easy to manage and the students and parents enjoy it so much.
The system and staff were incredibly user-friendly. This was a fantastic program.
This was great! Thank you for your support!
Our first Read-a-Thon went great! We ended up getting more readers registered and more donations than I thought we would our first time doing this. I hope to make this a yearly event at Lombardy Elementary.
It went very smooth despite school covid issues! Otherwise, as a new pto member... I had zero issues. Thank you!
Kari provided us with amazing support. The program is put together well and easy to facilitate.
This was a great and EASY fundraiser. It was our first year so we'll learned some ways to promote more for next time. Thank you for all your prompt replies and help.
Our Read-A-Thon was such an awesome experience. The students had so much fun and were so excited about reading! We doubled our fundraiser goal and it was so easy! The program is so organized and carefully planned out. The Read-A-Thon staff is always on hand and available to answer any question we had along the way. We will definitely host another Read-A-Thon next year.
Love, love, love the experience we had with Read-A-Thon! Your support staff is amazing and made starting a breeze. Our students were so excited to log their minutes and classes were competing for who had read more. Kids were talking about reading at the bus stops and during lunches. The notes friends and family could leave when making donations were so inspiring to our students.
It would be better if the sign up page was directed at parents/guardians instead of at the child-- we had an issue with some children cheating their minutes, and tried to make parents take over all data entry, but the messaging directly from read-a-thon.com was contradictory. I can't imagine we're the only school that has had kids cheat, and it's a frustrating thing to deal with.
It was fantastic! I got sick in the middle with the flu so I didn't personally get to promote to the kids as much as usual. But it all turned out great!
It was a great experience and fund raiser. Our board is mostly new to this and we look forward to getting more corporate sponsorships next year.
This was excellent for our school. So easy to manage and run. We will definitely have a Read A Thon once a year for our school.
We surpassed our goal, raising over $8,000 and our students read over 29,000 minutes! Thank you for making this such a fun and easy way to raise money for and increase reading at our school!
We loved our Read-A-Thon experience! The students were so excited and it could not have been any easier to manage! We raised over $7000.00 in just 2 weeks!
This was a very engaging and rewarding experience for students and parents. Thanks for making this a viable fundraising option.
We have come to love this fundraiser. Super easy to make/receive donations and promotes literacy. LOVE!
This program made our read-thon so much easier to manage!
Our Read-A-Thon went really well! The Read-A-Thon folks were super helpful anytime I had a question and answered really quickly. Also we got started really late (*I* got started really late), and they shipped out materials ASAP to get us going. Super customer service. Thanks!
Overall just a few things that would be better, mostly from a technology standpoint. If people want to donate, and it is not possible to do with some systems, it would be great if that info was relayed to the people trying to donate. It was not clear that they should use paypal. We had quite a few users very frustrated. I don't want to lose any potential money because people can't get the system to work.
This was our 1st attempt at any kind of A-Thon and we LOVED it! We will definitely do this again.
Thank you for the support around the READ-A-THON. It was a great experience and fun to watch the students work as a class around their goals. It would be great to have sample prizies to show students.
This fundraiser was so simple to facilitate and easy to track. It was a welcomed change to selling the same items over the years. Not to mention, we raised just as much money! Highly recommended!
It went really well! Unfortunately, we did not hit what we did last year do to Covid-19.
Our students and their parents loved it. As the Read-A-Thon school contact person, I loved it tool It was fun and easy. Thank you!
I loved the new way to contact potential businesses, but I was disappointed it didn't generate any responses/leads. :(
Many positive experiences and feed back from families and teachers. Kids loved to see their progress tracked everyday. We had a few issues particular to our school that was not compatible with the Read-A-Thon system and that we did not anticipate before the start of our fundraiser. First, our school is a private with grades PreK thru 8th. While the Read-A-Thon was perfect for our elementary school and younger, it was not a good fit for our middle schoolers. Our PTO tried to adapt it to make it age appropriate by offering our own challenges and activities but those students were still reluctant to activate accounts or fundraise given that the target audience of the Read-A-Thon system is obviously younger. Second, we were unaware that the flyers and materials would automatically include dress-down day announcements. This was not approved by our school prior to the planning of the event but there was not an option to modify the print outs. Finally, the school administration would not allow student's names to be entered into a "third party website" until parents were given the opportunity to "opt-out". We were delayed in preparing/advertising our fundraiser because of the need to communicate and gather responses from all families in our school In all, our school was happy with the money raised and using the Read-A-Thon system. Thank you for working with us.
I LOVE this fundraiser! It is so easy and it encourages our kids to read!
Wonderful! Thank you!
We enjoyed the read-a-thon very much, and plan on participating again next year. Thank you!
The Read-A-Thon experience was amazing! Our scholars were extremely motivated and enjoyed the challenge of reading as many minutes possible. This event was a huge success.
Everything ran smoothly.
Thank you, it went well.
Our Read A Thon went really well! In this time of uncertainty I wasn't sure how we would do but I was very pleased by the amount we received. I also appreciated several of the improvements from last year such as the improved dashboard.
Amazing fundraiser
This was the first fundraiser I’ve ever run by myself. I was shocked by how easy Read-a-Thon.com made it. The website interface was easy to understand and user-friendly. I would definitely recommend using Read-a-Thon.com to raise money for our school.
Great! Extremely easy to work with.
This was an amazing fundraiser for our school. Everything ran incredibly well. We will be doing this again next year!
We love using you for our Read-A-Thon. This is an easy fundraiser while promoting reading. It's been fun to watch the students compete for the "Top Minutes Read" spot. We will you use you again next school year.
The read a thon once again has been a very successful and easy fundraiser.
Super easy, successful and fun fundraiser!
We love our read-a-thon! We plan to do it again next year.
Everything was fine. It would be great if you offered more rupees of printable awards
We were overwhelmed with the phenomenal amount of support for our Read-A-Thon this year! We greatly surpassed the goal we set for our school this year.
Thank you so much for helping us raise money for our school library. I appreciate all of the work that is done on your end -- that makes things so much easier on MY end! I also appreciate how responsive customer service always is when I have a question. Kari -- thank YOU!!!
We had a wonderful experience with our Read-a-thon. The staff at your site were incredibly helpful and we will absolutely be doing this again in the future.
We were very pleased with the success of our Read-a-thon! It was a meaningful and easy fundraiser to hold. We will be looking to participate in the coming years!
Our first Read a Thon was a wonderful experience. We had many readers excited about reading! We expect to do this again next year.
Our school loved our Read-a-Thon! We are pleasantly surprised with how much money we raised in just two weeks. The communication through the website (especially the reports) was fabulous as was the color-copied personalized materials that were provided for each student. We could not have asked for anything more and plan on doing this again next year for our Read Across America Celebration in March. Thank you!!!!
For our second year in a row the Read A Thon was a great success for our schools!
The Read-a-thon was awesome! Not only did it inspire our students to read more, we raise money for our school. The process to sign up was super easy, materials were printed and sent to our school for distribution to our students' families, and the website keeps accurate information for administrators and teachers to check to verify participation.
This continues to be a great fundraiser for our school. We are on our fourth year!
Overall, it was a great experience for our school. We raised more money than we ever thought we would. Students were excited to get involved and loved our reading sessions during the school day. I would like to see the website improved. I found that the website took a while to load and I had to refresh the page several times throughout the last few weeks because the site seemed to be malfunctioning (the text box wouldn't allow me to type anything or the page itself would just be blank). When teachers entered in a class reading, sometimes the white box that popped up to let you know the time had been entered wouldn't go away after clicking "okay," and then the session would be doubled, resulting in admin having to go in and adjusting the times. Again, overall, it was a great experience; I would just like to see the technology part of this fundraiser improved. Thank you!
Our Best Read-A-Thon yet!
This is our 3rd read a thon. Each time we have one the read a thon representatives have been extremely helpful. I belong to the Friends of the Free Dover Public Library in Dover, NJ and hope to start a read a thon there as well. Thank you
This was our school's 2nd year participating and we are absolutely in love with this Read-a-Thon experience! By far the easiest and most successful fundraiser we have been a part of!
What an amazingly easy and fun fundraiser!!! Can’t wait to do it again next year!!!
This was our best Read-a-Thon yet! We love our yearly event!
This was a great, safe way to fundraise during the COVID-19 pandemic! Thanks for all you did to help!
The Read-a-thon was terrific. We raised over $2,000 more than last year and our readers logged thousands of minutes. Some students showed improvement in their Accelerated Reader scores during the Read-a-thon as well. There was much excitement on campus because students could see their minutes being recorded and the R.A.T bucks they earned each day.
This was our first Read-A-Thon and I think it was a big success. We encouraged students to read and were able to celebrate all students, regardless of how much money they raised (our school is very socioeconomically diverse). We raised a lot of money, despite school being virtual due to the pandemic. I think we would raise even more money during a normal school year.
This was our first time doing Read-a-thon. It was a great experience. We didn't raise what we thought possible but we have a very poor community, even our businesses struggle to stay open. After talking with many teachers and participants, comments were made that it would be nice to have PayPal or Venmo as a choice to make payments. Other than that, it went very well. We appreciate all the assistance given in our beginning stages, Kari was great.
We are amazed on well our Read-a-thon went!! Our students were so excited to read and log their minutes! We were blown away with the amount support we had!
I'd prefer my first automatic reward to require kids to set up an account AND send it to 3 people. I would also like to be able to print a list when they hit a threshold of 100 dollars or 3 supporters (2 prizes we added). Overall, great program. Will use again!
Your staff is immensely helpful and make it so easy with your website to host this event/fundraiser! We coincide Read-A-Thon with I Love to Read month! This year we raised over $7,000 and read over 90,000 minutes!
Our Read-A-Thon was wonderful. We has so much positive feedback from parents!
The read-a -thon was a success for the first time running it
This was our 1st Read-a-thon and it exceeded our expectations! We were able to raise double what was expected. Students loved the incentives of staff members doing wacky activities when we reached donation milestones.
We weren't sure how much to expect to raise from this as it was our first. But we were pleased with the overall experience and the amount raised, especially since it did not create any extra expenses. The few kinks our donators experienced were quickly resolved. Admin website was very user friendly and Kari was a huge help whenever we had questions.
We just needed more of the larger read a thon posters. otherwise, it was a complete success!
This was the easiest fundraiser ever!
This fundraiser went really well! The students read a lot and the money raised will help our school with field trips and books.
Read -A-Thon is the best fund raiser we have had in many years! We loved that it promoted reading while earning money for our PTA!
It went well for the effort. We didn't get participation from the high school. They were not interested in the rewards that were given life free recess etc.
Our Read-a-thon was amazing. The website was so easy for all of our students and staff to access and use. Read-a-thon’s support staff was extremely helpful with any questions we had as well as easy to get ahold of.
We had a great experience with our fundraiser! Thank you for giving us this opportunity and we will gladly be back next year! Bethel Academy
This was a true success! We loved the fact the staff can be involved in fundraising for their classes, and the group webpage helped us fundraise with staff who weren’t tied to specific rooms and students. We would love to be able to handle communications better- our parents largely disregarded messages sent from the Colby address, if you could develop a way to reach everyone and plug-in the school name as sender somehow would be awesome. We would also like an option for parents to donate their RAT bucks to the school if they do not want to spend in the RAT store.
It was a great experience again. We did it in correlation with Virginia Reads One Book which worked well. You all do a great job of making this program user friendly. We personally thank you so much for helping our school earn much needed funds in a time that other funds are very limited.
Great readathon!
Our very first read-a-thon went GREAT!!!
Our school's Read-A-Thon went very well this year! We were able to double the amount we raised last year. Everyone was very excited to raise money to support our school's library media center. We will definitely be doing it again next year!
The children and teachers look forward to the Read-A-Thon each year. Out-of-town family members feel that they have a part in helping the school. Reading is the main focus and the children are rewarded with prizes. It's a bonus for all participates. The company was helpful, friendly, and prompt. It's the most well organized, hassle-free, easiest fund raiser ever!
Our department has gone so quickly that our budget couldn't keep up. This Read-A-Thon was focused on students reading and it gave a way for their families to support them even if they didn't live close. The company was very supportive and positive. They were always available to answer my questions. It has been the best fund raising experience EVER!.
Our school absolutely loved this Read-a-Thon! We are very excited about the money that was raised for our school. We look forward to having another Read-a-Thon next year. Thank you!!
Hi Read-a-Thon, Kari was great and very helpful throughout the process! One suggestion for improvement is to make improve the software user interface. The business support portal and email system can be better - it is somewhat confusing. Best regards, Kevin
We think this fundraiser was a great success. We had some teachers really take this and run with it, while others didn't even seem to mention it to their kids. We plan on doing this next year, but with experience on our side, we will try and engage the teachers more. Overall, this was super easy, well organized and a great way to raise money and encourage reading. Thank you!
It really is good. This year we didn't have anyone directly in charge and it virtually ran itself. We now have a couple of volunteers who say they would like to be part next year...so we hope to make it bigger and better. :)
All in all, it went well for a Title 1 School. Ways to improve - 1. Include cash donation forms that can be sent home with children. As a Title 1 school, this would have been helpful. 2. Have a way to add sponsors who are donating items not money. For example, we are having a pizza party and we couldn't add the pizza place that donated pizza.
I was really pleased with how easy this fundraiser was and how much we made. We will definitely be back next year!
We really enjoyed the ease of your program. We were able to raise more funds than we expected in a short period of time. I wish there were ways to remedy duplicate readers more easily. Some of our readers had an account created at school and then created a secondary account at home. This made our reporting incorrect and required hand-counting of information on number of minutes read. I also wish there were more reports. I would like to know which teachers created class minutes and populated their classes. Finally, I wish you had more facebook ready promotional material. We ended up using screenshots more often than not and feel this area could be improved.
Love it, easy to use, administer, get people involved. Families love it too
Our Read-a-thon went great. We raised more than we did last year. The site is great
I probably had it open for too long. But not too shabby
The Read-A-Thon is great! It is a great way to raise money and encourage the students to read. The teachers had good feedback about the fundraiser and I exceeded my fundraising goal. The only thing that could improve my experience would be the reports. I would like more robust reports, with more information. I'd like to be able to run a report for a date range, and I would like the report to be in an Excel file format, not a CSV.
Another record setting year for Lincoln Elementary School for the Arts! I will NEVER do another type of library fundraiser as we LOVE Read-a-Thon.
I love the Read-A-Thon!! It encourages students to read while fundraising for our Literacy Center.
We were very pleased with the Read-a-thon!!! The classes had contests with each other. A very fun program. I had a lot of questions and your staff was amazing. We will be doing this every year and probably twice a year from now on.
This was the first time Sherman Elementary PTSA participated in the Read-A-Thon. What a great way to raise money for the school and not have to sell chocolate. Sherman will most definitely be raising money with Read-A-Thon next year. The support and staff were amazing! Sincerely, Jenny Boyle Sherman Elementary PTSA President
The Read-a-Thon was easy to administer, the students loved it, and we hit our goal within the two weeks schedule. A win-win-win.
This year went great, I like the changes you made in your system since last year! The teachers and families really appreciate the ease of this program. Thank you!!
The online donation function works very well. However, the reporting function doesn’t work very well. It was extremely difficult to track prizes when we tried to hand them out twice a week.
The Read-A-Thon was great! This platform is so easy to use! My only suggestion would be to show readers the top five like the admin. It creates competition and they try even harder to raise/read more right at the end. Other than that, this was a great fundraiser! Thank you so much!
The communications with the Read-A-Thon was fantastic!
This was super easy and students loved hearing the top 5 stats each morning. I was impressed with how well organized all the materials were and how quickly they arrived.
It was great! The only thing i would change is a little more information on the hand outs to the children and parents. I had to explain a lot at first
We enjoyed having all the materials provided for us. The website for admins was easy to navigate. Your customer service was wonderful and thorough to all questions and concerns we had during our read-a-thon.
This was our first On Line Read-a-Thon and we couldn't be happier with our experience. It is a great platform to use for years to come!
We are so happy with our turnout. We surpassed our fundraising goal!
Read-a-thon was a great fundraiser! It was super easy and went really well. It re-energized our students and their love for reading.
Great and easy to administer.
We love how simple it was to raise money and how easy we could find students, do rewards and easy for our Parents and staff. We will do this again!
Super Easy! This is our second read-a-thon and it was very smooth. I do like how they can earn prizes for both donations and minutes read. Two possible suggestions... We have had parents request a pledge type model... so they could come on and pledge that they will pay $.25 for each minute their child reads.. then it encourages the children to read rather than just a flat donation. Secondly, it would be very helpful if the date printed for EACH individual reward would show. Instead, the last time an award was given to a student shows on the printout. For example... if a student gets their ice cream reward on 02/12 ... then gets their treasure chest item on 2/14, the comprehensive list will show that all items were awarded on 2/14. We also had some students that got double rewards because the system pulled them up for rewards on multiple days.
It was great!
Since I have such a large district, this fund raiser was PERFECT. The staff were quite helpful and friendly. It was the easiest way to make money I've ever tried! Thanks Read-A-Thon!
This was one of the easiest fundraisers we have done! We had amazing participation!
Thank you for providing an easy to implement platform for raising money! It was pleasure working with all of you. I enjoyed the ease of gathering and sharing data for each class and each reader. Thank you again!
It was super easy and it was great way for parents and families to support the school readers! It is our biggest fundraiser of the year!
This fundraiser is AMAZING! I feel that people are more willing to donate to students reading efforts than to purchasing an item.
You made doing the Read-a-thon very easy and it was user friendly. We had a great experience and did well our first time. We will be looking into continuing this every year!
What a fun easy to manage fundraiser!
It was an amazing experience! I am overwhelmed by the generousity of our students and families! Thanks for providing this awesome platform!
The Read-a-thon was another successful event for our PTA. Students participate. The tools were fairly easy to use, I wish there was one button were you could just download all the activity by each day and download one final report. An Admin tool not a by reader or by teacher just one report that downloads everything with one click at the end of the program.
This was the first year we have used an online form for the read-a-thon and everyone from the teachers and parents enjoyed how simple it was. We saw an increase in participation, reading, and sponsors which all helped us reach our goal and more. I highly recommend Read-a-thon! You will love working with their team and their system. Columbia Christian in Portland, Oregon
Our Read-a-Thon was a success! Some parents felt the initial form that went home didn't include enough of an explanation. Otherwise, we received positive feedback.
Great experience! So easy and super positive feedback from our school families!
We had the best experience ever! Looking forward to next year!
The read a thon went great. The printed materials that were provided were extremely helpful.
We had some issues with data being lost or missing at the beginning, but the team was great at handling it and also was very responsive to requests. I wish the interface was a little cleaner and the site was more user friendly, but overall we are happy so far.
Our Read-A-Thon went well. We received a lot of positive feedback regarding how user friendly the website was.
Children had a great time. It created good competition between the classrooms. But best of all they had fun.
This was a great fundraising campaign for an otherwise difficult school year. It allowed students and parents to get engaged with the school event without risk of social gatherings. I would highly recommend.
This was the first online fundraiser for our school. I was very impressed with how simple everything went. I would highly recommend it to anyone. Thanks for making it a wonderful experience.
I am holding off comment until we go through the prize phase. I am hoping there is a decent selection of prizes for the students. Truthfully, I expected to receive more donation. 25% to give up seems like a lot based on what we took in.
We'd love some way to do different prize lists, one for K-5 and one for 6-8th because we are a K-8 school and our middle schoolers aren't interested in group prizes, or being called out for making goals.
Thank you! Choosing Option 3 helped us raise more money than last year. Looking forward to another next year.
Went well the children enjoyed it.
We absolutely loved hosting our Second Annual Read-A-Thon! I do know that we had a lot of technology difficulties towards the beginning. The one suggestion is that when the timer is done, there should be a bell or some kind of sound to show that time is up.
Our Read-a-thon wen very well. You made it very easy for us. Working with children is a fast paced business. I am positive that we will be working with you in the future.
We love doing our annual read-a-thon. Students, teachers, and parents look forward to this fundraiser every year.
This was our 2nd year participating in the Read-A-Thon and raised over $5,000. What a wonderful fundraiser and event for our school. I am hoping with all that is going on in the world right now that we will still get to celebrbate with our Author visit in May! Many thanks for a wonderful experience. Michelle Blum Lincoln School Edison
It has been great! We've raised 3,000 and have only had to read to do it! Hoping we can get a bit more in the next week or so. I won't be the librarian next year so I don't know if they will do it again, but I hope so!
We really loved this fundraiser. Things were very easy to follow for the most part. We talked and do wish there was a way for there to be a shorter log in for the students. Maybe the first time could be the big log in but then maybe they could make their own passwords or something. Some days the rewards were not accurate. I would check on the overall awards and things would not always show up. Otherwise we loved the program and how it was set up. We can't wait for next year.
Our Read-A-Thon did better than expected. It was our first year and I didn't know what to expect but it was easy, effective, and students were reading!! We will definitely do another one next year. Thanks for the great service.
Thank you so much for such a user friendly fundraising option! This was our districts first online fundraiser and we feel like it was a huge success!! We will definitely be hosting another Read-A-Thon next year!
This is the easiest fundraiser I’ve ever done in 18 years as an educator!
I will let Tiffany know if we receive more feedback, but overall I thought it was a great way to raise money for our school during such a different year! I think we would consider doing this again. I especially like that people from anywhere can participate without having to order something that they don't want or need. One comment I did hear from parents was when they set up their child's reading page, they did not like being prompted multiple times to send emails, post to Facebook, etc. They were wanting to explore the reader page first and possibly reach out to sponsors then. Especially for the family that may not be able to financially support the school, but does want their child to read, I think it would encourage those parents to want to log their child's minutes reading if the student page set up had fewer prompts.
If we are doing our own prizes, I'd love to be able to customize the online prize categories. i understand that you won't be able to print the prize sheets and that is fine. We can make our own prize sheets. Bur for tracking purposes it would be great if we could customize that.
We loved the Read-a-thon and will definitely do it again next year. It was super easy to administer and I love the convenience of the website to see how we were doing throughout.
Read-a-thon.com made our annual event so much easier this year. In the past, we have counted and tabulated minutes to determine prize levels. This year, read-a-thon.com did all that work for us, and we were able to track our progress in multiple ways. Thank you.
Really love this fundraiser! Easy to do and the split is fantastic.
We are very happy with the way our Read-a-thon went! It was stress free and by fair the easiest fundraiser we have done! We will definitely return to do more Read-a-thons.
Entering a reading session was confusing because of the two reading session tabs. It would be helpful if the texting option to ask to donate specifically said to enter your own cell number, not those you wanted to donate. Overall, this is a great fundraiser and super easy to run! Thank you!!!
Love it!
The Read-a-Thon was organized well and really easy to use!
This was SO easy! We raised quite a bit of money and the students were very excited!
Our school LOVED it!! Got the students reading and our PTO made some money. A win/win for all!
This is such an easy fundraiser for the school and contributors. The online pages and social media ease make donations easy!
Went very well. I believe we exceed our last 2 years of raising funds and minutes read! Thank you so much for your support!
Awesome fundraiser! We didn't get as much participants as we hoped, but we will definitely do this again next year!
It was great experience!. I think that could improve, by printing some diplomas and having more read-a- thon promotional videos and images. Also explaining the whole process since the beginning in a bulletin. This was the first time I did a Read-a-thon and I discovered how it works in different steps, and it was more difficult to plan ahead. Thanks you have great people, kari guided me all the way.
It was a great success!
Thanks! Our Read-a-thon went well despite the unusual circumstances this year. We look forward to another one next year!
I think our Read-A-Thon went well. We had some students not participate, but not too many. I liked the ease of the read-a-thon and how it basically ran itself. I sent daily reminders to students and families, to promote this fundraiser. I think there is definite room for improvement next year
I loved doing this. Something that I would improve on, is having more templates to send out via email to the readers/teachers thoughout the 2 weeks.
It was awesome! Best fundraiser we've ever done!!
We beat our goal this year to beat $4,000! Tiffany was super helpful whenever reached out. Managing the prizes was difficult and I wished each teacher could have managed distributing prizes.
Would like to see more certificates to print. Our students really enjoy this.
This was our first Read-a-thon, and it was easy, fun and so very safe! Tiffany was wonderful, patient, kind and so easy to work with, Thank you! I am very confident we will be doing this again!
This is one of the best, easiest fundraisers ever! Thank you for making it stress free on our part and being so prompt in answering all of our many questions that we had. It's a GREAT fundraiser to also encourage student reading and to get them excited...even if for some it was just for one week. It was WELL worth it all! Thank you so much!!
Super fun and easy way to make money for our school!
Our kids were excited to participate! Every morning looking at our board to see if we have reached our goals!
This was an amazing experience. We wanted to raise money for an author to come to our school. Not only did we raise enough money to do that but to also buy books for our school library. We raised over "$5,000 in 2 weeks!!! Thank you sooooo much!
This was a great experience for our school. We learned a lot from it and have plans for next years event. Plan ahead and advertise your event. Getting businesses involved is a great boost. Our kids stepped up in ways many didn't believe could happen. A success for us...
This was our first read a thon and it was easy to navigate and made fundraising so easy!
Once again, the easiest fund raiser! Kids are competing to read more while raising money for a great cause. Thanks for providing such a great fundraising opportunity for our school.
Due to the unfortunate events with the covid19, this was not one of best times to fund raise. Hope that everyone stays safe. Thank you for helping us out.
The Read-a-thon was a success. Our school absolutely loved it. Our students were motivated to read and our school raised money. Thank You.
We love this fundraiser every year. The only suggestion from a parent is that if there was a higher amount button to pledge, their family and friends would have clocked that button. Easier to click $150 or $200 than to type it in. So several simply clicked the $100 button, but would have given more. Will participate again next year!
Very easy way to raise money and promote reading!
We just had a record breaking Read-a-Thon for our media center and absolutely love this fundraising option! Personally, I'll never go back to the other fundraisers that our library has done.
We really enjoyed our 4 read a thon.
This read a thon was AWESOME. We raised a lot more money than we expected. It was very little work. Thank you all so Much!.
This was our second Read-A-Thon and it was a huge success again! Thank you for such a great fundraiser.
This was a very smooth fundraiser! Look forward to doing this for the next school year. Thank you!
Read-a-thon was great! We met our school goal and it's so easy.
This Read-a-thon was such a low stress fundraiser. The staff was awesome to work with when I had questions! Thank you for an amazing fundraiser for our school!
Our school commnity realy enjoyed the Read-A-Thon. It was very easy to handle and understand.
It was really fun watching all the donations come in and seeing the reading minutes go up. It was lots of fun.
This was our first time doing the Read-a-thon and it exceeded our expectations. Our students were very excited as well as our staff. I can't wait until next year to host another Read-a-thon! Thanks again for your support!
The Read-A-Thon was a wonderful experience in our school. There are a few things that I would have preferred be different, but they're not necessarily a "fault" of the Read-A-Thon corporation. 1) Most of the materials are strongly geared towards younger kids. We are a middle school and I had to make most of the promotional material and informational videos myself. The items provided by Read-A-Thon were too juvenile for our school 2) We had a HUGE problem with the program duplicating minutes. Scott, in IT, was INCREDIBLE. A huge hats off to your entire customer service department. They were kind, gracious, and helpful; adeptly solving each problem. They are a CRUCIAL and UNIQUE part of your program and a major reason why our Read-A-Thon was successful. Overall, this was a fantastic experience for our school. My favorite moment was half way through the first week, when one student said to another, "This is WAY better than a book fair." Thank you so much for enlivening the joy of reading in our school.
This was our first time doing a read-a-thon and it went well. We had a great experience working with you. We will probably do another read-a-thon in the future. We needed to contact support since some of the rewards were not showing up. They were very helpful and got the problem fixed quickly.
We really enjoyed the ease of this fundraiser. We weren't expecting for students, parents, and teachers to get as excited as they did to be involved in the Read-A-Thon. Needless to say we were pleasantly surprised and are in the process of discussing doing this again next year!
We can't emphasize enough how easy this "fundraiser" was for our school! It was also a fun way to keep promoting reading as a school goal! We started our fundraiser one week before the mandated school closings and we don't feel this effected the outcome at all. It was also a way to stay connected. We will definitely be doing another one in the future! Thank you for making things so easy and enjoyable, wait what, a fundraiser, easy and enjoyable? Yep! Thanks again!
Great experience and everything was so easy! Our Rep was fantastic even though we had email issues (not her fault) and she did everything to make sure we finally were receiving them.
Super easy and quick to manage.
Great site! Very easy to use.
It exceeded our expectations. I will follow up with some suggestions
We appreciate Readathon and have done three in the last 18 months, raising nearly $20,000.
This was an awesome fundraiser. I will definitely do it again next year. It was beneficial to our students and a great way to raise money. The teachers loved it. I have recommended it to all of the media specialists in our county.
This has been a great fundraiser for our school! The principal and teachers did an amazing job of getting the kids excited and reading. The families loved the opportunity to share a fundraiser with family they normally can’t “sell” to. The Read-A-Thon immediately followed a very successful fundraiser and we were still able to blow our goal out of the water. (Our expectations were low after realizing we had timed the 2 fundraisers back-to-back.). We will definitely do a Read-A-Thon again!!!
Our Read-A-Thon went great! We are thrilled with the program and the results.
It went great (well for as long as school was open due to Covid-19).
Students and teachers loved the Read-a-Thon! It generated a lot of excitement for reading (and the prizes!)
Thank you!!! This was super helpful and easy to use!!!
We loved this!
The process was easy, and the kids really enjoyed it!
The children loved participating in the read-a-thon. This was super easy to run.
We utilized this program 2 years ago, then last year decided to do on our own. After evaluation, decided to go through your program again. You make it easy. Staff super helpful! Wouldn't change anything about this program. However, I did have a few families mention they were worried about on-line safety!
It was a great experience for our students.
I loved it!
Read-a-thon went great. We will likely do this again next year.
Our students loved the Read-a-thon. We will definitely be using it again!
Even during this virtirual learning, we had a great experience. Thank you very much!
This is a fundraiser the school will likely try again in the future. This was an initial test run and it seemed to work well. I would love to see us do it again in a bigger way. Thank you for your help with getting us from the start to the finish line!
This was a great fundraiser to help build up our reading school library!
What an easy way to raise money for our school! Thank you for making things so easy!
Our read-a-thon was a great success
We loved the Read-A-Thon! It was super organized and easy to administer. Whenever I had questions, everyone was informative and pleasant. I highly recommend the Read-A-Thon to promote literacy while fundraising for your organization.
We loved it!
We absolutely loved participating in Read-A-Thon. From logging in the first time to ending the it, everything was easy to do. Our associate,Kari, did an outstanding job of answering our questions in a quick and timely manner. RIdge raised over $1500 before we even went live with our Read-A-Thon. Parents loved the online tool and sharing via social media. We did make it a school competition and teacher and students tired to raise the most money or read for the most minutes. Unfotunately our fundraiser was cut short due to our state closing our schools. We continued to post but did not recieve many donations.
The read-a-thon went well for the first year. I plan to have another one and fixing any of the problems we occurred this first year.
It was great and the online process was easy to use! Parents loved it!
Our Read-A-Thon went well. Your staff has been very helpful.
Our experience with your company was great. The ladies I spoke to were very helpful
It was great. It might be a nice idea to include possible templates for certificates that can be printed for students (participation, most minutes read, most money raised,etc.). Just a thought. Thank you!
It went well. Thanks for your help!
So easy to use and no volunteers needed!! This has really been helpful since volunteers are hard to come by at our school!
This was the easiest fundraiser our school has ever held! We will definitely hold another one next year!
Overwhelming very well for the first time. We will definitely be participating again.
I love doing the Read - a - Thon! This is the second one we did. It is so user friendly and Tiffany was so helpful! She was always quick to get back with me and answer any questions we had. The students were excited and motivated to participate. We will definitely be participating in another Read-a-Thon next school year!
It was a great experience. We will be doing this again next year, especially now that we know what we are doing.
Another great Read a Thon Thanks! One comment from a teacher is they would like the ability to enter individual student minutes, in addition to adding to the class as a whole. Also, I wasn't able to tell where to check for any outside donations came from Facebook. Perhaps add a sections in the Donations report for Facebook. Thanks again! Malissa Knight
Some parents did not like the online fair idea. But not many. We are going to include a question about this on our end of the year survey. The younger teachers took to this really well! Overall, it was very easy and saved me, the Reading Coordinator, a lot of work.Thanks to the person who thought of this!!
We had a much more successful Read-a-thon than expected, which is wonderful! However, in the pages that are pre-printed for each student, it would be helpful for there to be a Spanish translation on that same page, or at least a line written in Spanish explaining that more information could be found online in Spanish. I would have also liked to see the dates of the Read-a-thon on those pages, as well as our PTA email address. We have a problem with flier blindness, so having more info on one page, rather than more pages, would be helpful. Thank you!
Read-A-Thon went so well for our first year doing anything like this. It was so much simpler than any of those catalog fundraisers. Friends and family of our students really responded and seemed excited to support this fundraiser.
Things went very well and we are looking forward do doing another one next year!
The Read-a-thon went well. Families seemed to love it and scholars were excited.
This was an easy program to use and to share with the families! Kari has been INCREDIBLY helpful and patient answering my questions and helping us! I am hopeful that when we do our next event the students will be back on campus so we can really get the excitement level high and read more minutes and earn more donations!
Thank you for all you have done to help organize and run our Read A Thon.
W.H. Ford School
Regina, SK, Canada
This was a good event. You have to do one to understand how it works. There are a ton of great tools for teachers and students. Thanks for a great site, and a great event. We will be doing this again.
This was a wonderful fundraiser for our school! Thank you for your help in setting up and answering questions.
This was highly successful for us. We are a small school and last year's Read-A-Thon earned our PTA around $1800 without an on line donation option. With the online donation option, quality advertising and huge principal support this year's Read-A-Thon earned us over $4500! I'd say it was a huge success!
It was a great experience. The neat thing was the entire school read the same book. It was just great to discuss and talk about the book with everyone. Teachers and students really enjoyed the process.
Hi there! You guys made it super easy to have this read-a-thon. Thanks for everything! Liz
It was great fundraiser for our school! There was some feedback that the initial amount listed for donation was a bit high and discouraged some contributors. Also we had at least student get "locked out" of their account which never did get resolved.
It was a wonderful fundraiser! We had great success and we hope to do this every year!
The read-a-thon was easy to set up, easy to promote via email and social media, and our school had excellent participation!
We had to abbreviate our big push due to Covid 19. Out of sensitivity to families and their financial situations, we only had one week of solicitation. We raised about half of what we earned last year, however, we chose the 75% model this time, so we won't see as much profit. Overall it has been a good experience working with your company and we hope to work with you again next year.
Tiffany has been great through the entire process!
It went really well! Thank you for all of your help!
The Read-A-Thon has been such a success for our school. We have done it for 2 years now and it couldn't be simpler. It is a great way to raise money for the school. My favorite part is that it gives reading at home a kick-start. Thank you for making this so easy and fun!
Read-a-thon was a big hit! Student
Everything was so easy as the administrator and the team was always willing to help! We will definitely do this again!
Thank You!
It went great for the beginning two weeks. I personally made it too long of a time period. But your suggested 2 weeks would have been perfect. This is have the best fundraiser so far this year for our trip. I will be doing this again in the future!
Everything went well with our Read-A-Thon. We raised more money than anticipated and it has been the most successful fundraiser ever for the School. The only suggestion I’d have is to make the various models for fundraising more visible, as I was under the impression only the prize model was available.
We love doing the READ A THON!!
Everything went smooth this year.
It was a great success! My students loved tracking their minutes and building their reading stamina. I did get a lot of feedback from parents that setting their child up was confusing and so they were not able to do it. As a teacher, I would like to see what the student set up process looks like so I can talk to parents trouble shooting it.
Teachers enjoyed the simplicity in the event without having to collect money and the emphasis on reading. A few concerts were prize levels were set to high for this community.
We had such a wonderful time participating in the Read-A-Thon! Our students loved reading everyday and enjoyed having guest readers come in to read to their class. . Families, friends and our community were beyond generous and we couldn't be more grateful for their contributions!
We LOVED the ease of this read-a-thon.
The readathon was a great way to get kids involved in reading and boost self-esteem!
The Read-A-Thon program has really been easy to use and run. All of the online tools are available to run a successful Fundraiser. Also, if you have a question, the staff is only a phone call away and they were always helpful. We will definitely use the Read-A-Thon program again to raise money for our school.
The event went well for a first time outing. It offered a tremendous learning opportunity for us on how this event is run and how we can be more prepared the next time out to have a greater successes. All in all, this was a successful venture for the school.
I would love to have the date of donation added to the All Donations by Reader report. It would be useful in being able to see most recent donations.
Our kids loved the read-a-thon!
We were overwhelmed by the generosity of our community and excitement of the children's participation.
We had a great experience. We did have some difficulty using the social media links. The facebook link would say "successful" but nothing showed up on our school facebook page. The links can be more user friendly instead of being given a code.
We greatly appreciated the help from Read-a-thon. Although the percentage fees seem large, we know we saved much in the way of Printing fees and prize purchases. Also, by having an easy website, so many more people were able to sponsor our students than if we just did our sponsor sheets and envelopes retrieval. Also, as this was our first year, I had so many questions. I called many times to get clarification on some items; every call was readily received and answered sufficiently. Thank you greatly!
The option to change the initial prize should be available after the start of read a thon.
Our first Read-a-thon was a seamless success. We were able to encourage our students to develop a love for reading while earning over $ 3,000 to support school activities! If you want your students to grow as readers, this is the fundraiser for you.
Our fundraiser was great! The students, the teachers, the parents were very excited. This is our first time participating in the Read-A-Thon and we will definitely participate in this fundraiser again!
We learned a lot as a spur of the moment fundraiser without really much pre-planning. We will use again for sure
Best library fundraiser we have ever done! I'd never go back!
Thank you Read-A-Thon for having such a fun easy fundraising tool! Our school is health
This was our first year attempting a Read-a-Thon. We were pleasantly surprised with the turnout and anticipate doing this again next year!
The students enjoyed reading to raise money for their field trips. Some students asked if the prizes could be changed for next time, so that they could purchase some different items with their R.A.T bucks.
I was a little disappointed in the change in the read-a-thon from last year. The main change that occurred was that the smaller prizes were not provided by the company. While this seems a small thing, it did make it more difficult for us to find the small prizes on our own. However, I do love the way the program is run. For our small school size (450 students), it is very easy for one person to run it by herself. It only takes me about an hour a day to get all the prizes compiled and labeled to deliver to the school the next day.
By far the easiest fundraiser to run at our school. Our students we excited to log in their reading minutes during March is reading month. We hope to have several more participants next year. Thank you for making this so easy for our PTA and parents!
The read-a-thon was very easy to roll out thanks to your assistance and all of the materials you provided. The prize center is always an incentive, but I had some families that were willing to opt out of the prizes in order to give the earning back to the school. Maybe that could be considered in the future? My final suggestion would be for it to be mandatory for all families to enter an email when creating their pages. That way we could have utilized the messaging more effectively.
The Read-a-Thon went OK for our second try. Though only 41 students out of almost 700 students donated. We need some more ideas of how to get the word out and to get kids excited. I also need more flexibility with the prizes. We liked that we could choose what we give, but we would have liked more flexibility of coming up with our own prizes and own goals. I may have missed that if that was already an option. We will give it another try next year.
We loved our read-a-thon! It was the perfect way for our school to promote our amazing reading programs and encourage our students to read, especially with family and friends.
We love the Read-a-thon I believe it's a great way to inspire the students to read and raise funds for the PTA.
What an easy way to raise money and encourage children to read especially because it's all electronic.
Read-a-Thon was fantastic! We did very well and the kids loved it!
This was great!
: ) Went great!
Great fundraiser! Easy to set-up and love the dashboard stats to encourage students on reading minutes and classroom donations. The staff answered any questions very quickly...even when sick!
Thank you! It exceeded our expectations for our 1st year.
You guys were absolutely wonderful to work with! Made it very easy and the help was always there when I needed it.
Our Read-a-Thon went better than we expected! We had a great experience overall. Our representative was very good at keeping in contact and answering questions. The program itself was easy to promote and very low stress for the teachers and everyone involved. The students really enjoyed it, as well. The only suggestion we could make is that the prize options could be explained a little bit better. But overall, we had a great first experience.
Loved it!
Went great! Will use it in the futurw
This was an amazing experience!
I think the overall experience was great! It was a great way to get students invested in reading.
We are a small non for profit preschool and this is by far our most successful fundraiser every year!! We love it because it is education based and we are not asking the parents to buy things they do not need or sell things to friends and family that they don't need. We love Read-A-Thon!
I love this program, i just wished I knew how to get more involvement.
The Read A Thon website is easy to use and fairly easy to run. Please add a parent contact email to be entered on sign up. This will increase participation during he virtual school era as some middle school parents did not seem to know what was going on as their middle school students act independantly often. Outside parties such as the PTO cannot send emails to protected student (minors) emails that they registered with. So, I have been trying to notify winners to mail them prizes and I cannot reach them through their student email. This is leading to hours of follow up. Parents were upset with the PTO raising the individual goal at too large a jump, and since the PTO logo appeared they complained. RAT did follow up by phone but did not want to change the independent goals. Consider adding a secondary school program will cooler teen prizes, motivators and examples. Since more schools will not be meeting in person it can really help you make money! I still need to access contacts as we close down so please do not erase the info from this read a thon.
Read-a-thon was an easy way to encourage our students to read more and build our school library! We look forward to running this program again next year!
I loved the Read-A-Thon! It was super easy to do it and the parents in the classroom were very engaged! I invited family members to come into my classroom and read to the children. Grandparents, siblings, and parents signed up to read. It was fun! We honestly raised more than I thought we would. As the administrator of this fundraising event and a teacher in one of the classrooms participating in it, I was a little hesitant to do a Read-A-Thon at first because I didn't know if I was going to have the time to do this. Who has time for anything else when you're in the classroom, right? But then after I started, and read how it works, it was a piece of cake! It didn't take much of my time and we had great results! And, by the way, Kaiti (my read-a-thon support) was very nice and replied quickly to all my messages. Thank you Kaiti!
Read-A-Thon was a great success for our small school! It was simple to run and the students loved earning prizes!
This was our first time and it went smoothly. We had a difficult time starting due to weather and getting students to participate. That's whey we decided at the last minute to enter all students thanks to the quick work of your staff. Support was always available as needed. Yes, we will be participating again next year.
Very well organized!
It was super easy to use!
The read-a-thon went well. This is our second year doing one and we did better than last year.
Our Read-A-Thon went well. Thank you for another great year!
Such a great success for us!
This was my first time being a part of Read-A-Thon. I think the students really enjoyed it and Tiffany was wonderful to work with. Looking forward to doing this one again!
As a small K-8, this program seemed to work out. Each student had a great support team and the comment were awesome. It was hard to find businesses who could buy ads or donate money. That said some were very supportive in donating items for top readers/fundraisers. The website seemed to be glitchy at times (student page login, reports, payment, etc). Could use some fliers for the final days (picking prizes before suspense). Soon, we will see how the kids like their prizes and how the pay out works. The support team were fantastic, checking on stasticking tus, sending the materials, and promptly answering questions.
I have had a difficult time this go round because I am losing my library secretary and I have been pulled in many directions. Kari has been extremely helpful and I definitely appreciate that. Can't believe we raised more than last year with all we have had going on.
This was such a great fundraiser for our school. It promoted the reading that we already push in a very fun and competitive way! The students loved getting prizes along the way and I even threw in a few extra incentives to increase participation. We will definitely be doing this again.
Hello The Read A Thon went fantastic! We would like to have more tools in Spanish made available as we have parents who have English as a second language. Materials geared toward special education as well would be beneficial as we now have that population. Our school really got behind this, we had a book sale at a local bookstore, guest reader and exceeded our plan by almost $2,000!
I think it went quite well considering we're about 1/3 virtual.
This was incredible! Such a simple and yet meaningful way to raise money for our class. The only thing that would have helped would be to have a helpful video for parents on how to activate their child's profile.
Would love to see videos geared more towards upper elementary students. Love the updates to the website.
The best part of this is being able to donate online. There were a lot of confusion with how to get the kids registered though and parents were having trouble with the code. I would suggest having a way to use parents phone numbers to send out text messages instead of emails. Not everyone has an email, or checks them for some reason, so sending out messages were not always effective. Another issue was when kids earned a prize I did not see a way to show that they claimed the prize or not. There was no option for that and it was frustrating to see that. If you have any way to fix that, then please fix that.
Awesome program! We loved it. My contact Tiffany was so helpful and got right back to me when I emailed with questions.
Very easy to use.
I was pleasantly surprised with the Read-a-Thon! I had been looking at it for a while, but it seemed to good to be true. There was not as much prep work as traditional fundraisers and I loved that I did not have to deal with any cash. The process has been pretty smooth and the customer service is top notch! I look forward to participating in another Read-a-Thon!
I loved the simpleness of the read-a-thon. It would great if kids could create their own goals to at least show sponsors.
This was our second of many more Read A Thons to come. It is easy and very user friendly to manage. We love all the printed materials that are included to in this program.
The experience was great. We are already planning the next read-a-thon. We have learned some valuable lessons about how to do even better next time.
As a school, we had an amazing amount of support!! It was the love that families showed to their children and wanting them to read that showed in our overall success!!
Thank you everyone who supported the Mifflin students in the past 2 week Read-A-Thon. We were successful with exceeding our goal. The students are very excited about field trips next year. Thank you all again. :)
This was the perfect fundraiser for our school during these times where everyone in our district was learning from home.
It was great. The person helping us from Read-a-thon was really fantastic also.
Our read a thon went well. Very easy to use. We already have ideas on how to improve the next one!
We LOVE the Read-A-Thon! Being a small, private Christian school of 25 kids, this fundraiser allows us to EARN over $2,500! It's easy and people are more willing to donate to an educational program than having to buy something they don't need. We highly recommend this fundraiser to any school. Ottawa Christian Academy Ottawa, IL
My Read-a-thon went well. I was able to raise more money than I was expecting.
We enjoyed our read-a-thon. We had a lot of parents say that they like this fundraiser much better over the fundraisers where you sell things. We even had a reading time at the school where we invited all grandparents to come read with their grandchildren on grandparents day. It was well attended even with the rain that day. Thank you for providing a different way to do a fundraiser for our school while encouraging them to read.
Read-a-thon was incredibly easy to do and everyone involved loved it - administrators, teachers, media specialists, PTA, parents and students. Thank you!
we had a better go at it this year. Last year was low participation. This year so much better.
Experience is a wonderful learning tool! Now that we have completed the first one, and have learned how to utilize the system fully, we look forward to next year! I greatly appreciate the call from Crystal about a week into the read-a-thon to help address my questions - please continue to do this - it was very helpful!
We love this fundraiser... it gets kids excited to read!!
We loved the Read-a-thon! We like to focus on literacy here at Simmons. This year we raised more by focusing on our top readers each day. We did school wide announcements to highlight those top readers by grade level. I think that helped boost our efforts.
Great!
Another successful read-a-thon. Super easy to manage, kids excited about reading and money raised for a very worthwhile cause. Thanks!
I enjoyed it for a first-time fund-raiser. I made more than previous Book Fairs.
This was an easy fundraiser and your representative Tiffany was very helpful. I'm sure now that our parents see how this works, they will be ready for the next time we do this read-a-thon. Thank you. Ruth
Our Read-A-Thon was great! It was easy to disseminate information to our students, teachers, and parents. The various reports available were very useful in promoting competition between classes. I would like a way to be able to sort individual donations by date.
I felt it went great! The kids were excited to read to raise money for our school! The Read-A-Thon company handled all the hard work and made it extremely easy for the school. Overall, it was a very positive experience. I hope we get to do it again.
This year was great. We had much more participation. The only issue was when people made donations they were unable to change the name of who donated and no follow-up email came to made edits unless you contacted Read-a-Thon.
Easy and effective fundraiser!
The set up of the read a thon was super easy and the staff was awesome! They were very quick to handle our issues and very easy to deal with.
What a wonderful way to fund raise. I am appreciative that the platform was simple to follow and was easy for parents to understand. This is our second year with read-a-thin and certainly will not be our last.
This was an incredible experience for our students. We were able to raise money for our school in the simplest way possible, but more importantly it spurred our students on to read. They were so excited about reading! They loved to check their minutes and each class set their own goals! You could hear the classes cheering when they reached their reading goal! Thank you for making this such a positive experience. We will be doing it again next year!
Kids were so excited and our minutes and money set new records for this year. Way to go Read-a-thon. We will be referring you to our sister schools in the region.
Our Read-a-thon was a hit! It was awesome to see the students excited about reading and having fun! It could not have been easier...can't wait to 'grow' this fundraiser next year!
This is the easiest fundraiser to manage. Your team was terrific to work with and the kids were really engaged.
It went really well. I wish there was clearer instructions as to how everything worked. Once things got started it was easier, but prepping teachers for it was a little hard. Some didn't know what was going on. Other than that, It was a great experience.
Everything was fine except: I had one parent complain about how the link at the part where it tries to get parents support financially after initial set up of their page, it says “I don’t want to support my child...” or something to that wording. I didn’t personally over think that one but in a Title 1 District, I can see how a parent might find offense in it. In a world where we live with everyone being offended by anything these days, that might be something you consider rewording. Otherwise, everything was great!
We weren’t sure if we should do a fundraiser during Covid, but our community, families and friends were very supportive. Our read-a-thon went very smoothly.
It was easy to set up and maintain throughout the fundraiser. We raised more money than I expected.
We loved the fundraiser for our school. The focus on reading is wonderful and the materials are easy to understand and use. Ms. Kari was amazing at helping us out with all of our rookie questions. It was a bit harder to use the materials being all virtual this year due to the pandemic. It would be helpful to be able to use the pre-printed documents as a word doc instead of a PDF, so that we can change wording (e.g. we couldn't "hand out" materials, so it would have been helpful to change that word in the pre-written messages instead of having to re-write it from scratch because a PDF cannot be changed, unless you have a special PC program). This year is unique, though, and it might not be necessary in the future. We are looking forward to working with you again - and will hopefully be in person at that point to be able to use all of your wonderful materials and handouts. Thank you for a great experience and thanks to Ms. Kari for her wonderful support! The Galway Lions PTA Galway ES - Silver Spring, Maryland
It was very easy and we were very impressed with customer service. Unfortunately we had Hurricane Dorian scare and schools closed down when we had planned to originally start Read A Thon. I think a lot of families spent disposable money on Hurricane supplies as well as donations going to Bahama's Relief. The one thing we were disappointed in was number of participants that actually signed up only about 10% of school participated. We have had trouble in the past with online fundraising so don't know how to get past that with our school population. We did the reminders, we had a PTO kick off on the first day and the morning TV crew announced the leading classes in each grade several times. We also had facebook posts on the parents group and school pages. We had a prize for the top class in each grade gets a popcorn and cotton candy party. Not sure if the reading actually got logged. It would be great to have preset daily email reminders to send teachers to have them involved more or some way to get them pushing it. We tried. Will do it again but maybe not as our main fundraiser as we had hoped it would be.
This was a great experience and we will definitely consider doing this again next year.
Super easy. Fun way to earn money!!
Overall it went well. We would have liked more of our families to get involved but understand that it’s been a hard year for a lot of people.
I enjoyed the ease of the program , my only suggestion is to better explain how it works on the parent sheets.
This is the fourth time I have run a read-a-thon through your company, and each time I am so impressed! This is a simple, effective way to raise money for schools, and the kids and staff love it! The customer support is wonderful! I look forward to running another read-a-thon through this company next year!
You made the entire process extremely easy. The kids had a wonderful time and we were able to raise money for our school. We will most definitely be doing this again next year!!
Perhaps have a middle school age program.
We started strong, but since it ran through our spring break, it lost some steam at the end. I suggested this might be an issue, but the PTO President wanted it this way. Next year, we will make sure the time frame doesn't run during a school holiday. But otherwise, it was easy for parents and teachers to use your website. Our school still needs to figure out a way to get more kids to participate in this as we still only had 80 or so kids in a school of 480ish. This was also the same situation last year. Some of this is demographics of our school, but some is apathy from parents. As a school, we will have to brainstorm more ways to get people involved in this. But all in all, we had a good experience. Thanks!
It went well for the first one we ever had.
Our third time doing Read-a-thon. We loved it!!! One recommendation: It would be nice to differentiate between reader minutes entered by readers vs teachers. (If teacher enters minutes under "single reader" it shows up for admin as "reader." I had a teacher that wasn't sure if what she entered went through or not when website was bogged down. ) Thanks for another successful Read-a-thon!
The students really enjoyed the read-a-thon! It was a great success for us.
The Read-A-Thon is the easiest way to fundraise! We have roughly 250 students and I do not push this onto my parents. I know between book fair, sports, spirit wear, and everything else they have going on, I do not push... I probably have roughly 30-40 students participating. Every year we raise more and more. I did not think I would be over $2000. I LOVE IT!
This was our first time using the online read a thon. It was wonderful. They made everything so easy to do. The students loved the safari theme. I am already looking forward to next year's event.
I loved this fundraiser. The platform, along with the customer service and the overall experience was GREAT and I can't wait to do another one this year.
Amazing customer service! Wonderful fundraiser! This is a great way to earn money for our students. This will definitely be a fundraiser for many years to come! Thank you!
Thank you so much for making this as easy as possible.
The Read-a-thon went well and I appreciate all your support!
All of Grand Avenue would like to thank you so much for your support! Our Read-A-Thon was a great success and we look forward to building our classroom libraries with new books.
It was a delightful way to encourage reading and parent/community support! We will plan another one next year!
Our read a thon was amazing! The kids had a spirit week for reading to end the event and it was wonderful.
This was amazing!! We did such a great job on this first year. I wish that the prized were more geared to the younger children that I have in my school since we are a daycare.
This was great! Thanks!
Our Read-a-Thon went way better than expected this year. I was unsure how it would go this year due to some students being at school and some at home by virtual or packet. I'm glad we decided to stick with it and do it.
This read-a-thon has been a great experience for our school. We have used it as a way to promote reading and to help raise funds for equipment. I will do it again!
I have had a good experience and i would like to send my special thanks to Kari who have been helping me organize the read a thon. Thank you
Overall, I think it has been very successful and will consider holding another one next year. I do think the FAQ information should be clearer that if you select the prize model option the school is not entitled to any remaining money the students do not spend.
Ability to upload video messages
I think the Read-a-Thon went well. The school enjoyed it.
Loved pretty much everything about it! The program is pretty intuitive- looking forward to some of the upgrades/updates Tiffany informed me of. We have decided to make this an annual event. We were pleasantly surprised by the success of the event given the challenging circumstances of virtual learning during the current pandemic.
It was fun! I hope we get to do it again next year. : )
We LOVE this fundraiser! My book club runs it to pay for our book club books, a reading convention that the students attend, and then we make a contribution to the Adult Literacy program in our county.
This was very easy to do! You offered great support and all the supplies. We are considering ways to increase involvement next year. Thank you!
Our first Read a Thon went pretty well considering our whole school is still virtual. I loved how easy it was to navigate!
We had a great read-a-thon, all the money goes to our teachers for supplies in there classroom. Thank you.
This fundraiser was great and so easy! I was able to admin it on my own, which meant a lot because we don't have a large pool of parent volunteers to draw from. Tiffany and Kari were incredibly helpful and supportive. And I really think our families liked the ease of having an online donation option! The words of encouragement for our students were very heart-warming to read. Thanks for everything Read-a-Thon!
This was our most successful read-a-thon to date! Thank you for making it so easy for us to get this going!
The Read-A-Thon exceeded our expectations. It was an easy way to fundraise while encouraging the Students to read. The feedback from the parents and teachers was very positive and everyone was happy to support a good cause while earning money for the school.
I love how this promotes literacy!
This was our first RAT, an amazing experience !!!! Thank you !
This is my favorite fundraiser to run as it encourages our students to read and it's super easy to support as a PTA. This is my last year as PTA President so I'm not sure if the new president will want to participate next year.
Such an easy and fun fundraiser
We loved using Read-a-Thon.com!! We will be using you again next year for sure!!
The Read-a-Thon is a great fundraiser for our library. We raised more money this year than we did last year. These funds will be used to enhance our library with books and reading incentives for our students.
The Read-a-thon was such a success, both in raising funds for our library and getting our students to read.
I am surprisingly pleased at the outcome of the Read-a-thon! Our students were supported, the majority participated, and the the program was easy to use! It was a definite success!
Things went well! Thanks so much.
This was our 1st time hosting a Read-A-Thon and we think it went VERY well! We are excited to make this an annual event and increase our fundraising goal for our school's library. Thank you for making the process easy and user friendly. We have received lots of positive feedback from our school's families. Thank you Read-A-Thon.com! Sincerely, John Garcia Casey Librarian
It was very easy to run. My only problem was that when teachers entered their own reading sessions, my view would show that they entered a session for 0 minutes. I would edit it to show 15 minutes, but when I would look the next day - it would say 0 again. However, our total appeared to be correct, so I didn't worry too much.
We love participating in Read-A-Thon each year! It is by far our most successful fundraiser for our small, non for profit, preschool. One thing I would like to see is a way to email out the information to the parents instead of the printed pages. I had so many parents tell me they accidently threw the paper away and I had to print new ones.
We raised over $2,000 in 3 weeks and the school read over 120,000 minutes! I loved this!!
It was our first one ever and I think we did well. Next time, I have a few more ideas on how to be more successful!
This was our 1st Read-a-Thon and we felt we were very successful. We are hoping to have even more participation next year!
This was the best way to earn money for our library. We raised $2749.85! That's three times the amount we raised last year. It was so easy. Once the classes and names were set up, the Read-a-Thon did everything else.
Great easy fundraiser that promotes reading and encourages students through incredible prizes to build an incredible foundation.
Super simple and easy to run!
A couple things I can think of: 1. Need new and more videos that could be used for kick off events to inform students and staff. 2. Don't have the emails sent out by the school's fundraiser leader say it's from Colby @ Read-a-thon. It's confusing.
Our read-a-thon was a great success. It was great to support our library through reading!
Everything was great!
The Read-A-Thon was a fun and easy fundraiser for our school!
It went way better than I ever imagined! We will definitely be using this each year for our fundraiser!
We had a good Read-A-Thon. It was a great alternative to our annual book fair!
This was the easiest fundraiser I have ever hosted. While we didn't earn as much as I had hoped, I am still pleased. I think, in the future, a date earlier in the school year would be more profitable.
Our families loved it and participation exceeded our expectations!
I thought that this was a genius idea. So easy.
Everything went very smooth with our Read a Thon. This program is so easy to use and a great way to get students involved. I loved how friendly and helpful the staff is. I appreciated the fact that I could just email our list and they would upload them for me. Thank you!
Loved it. Kids had so much fun!
We loved this experience. Thank you for helping make this a successful event for our school.
A success!!!!
I am so proud of our Blue Jay family for working so hard during this Read-a-thon and raising money for our school. Great Job Blue Jays!
Such an amazing, easy fundraiser! Looking forward to doing it again next year!
This read-a-thon really made my students excited about reading! Throughout the year its hard to keep them motivated to read, this was a great way to ignite the love of reading!
2 improvements requested: 1. A few parents mentioned that they'd like to see paypal as a payment option for donations. 2. The free photo incentive seems like a great idea, but would be useful if families could upload a photo via their child's page instead of requiring volunteers take photos of the students at school via the RAT camera function. We simply don't have the volunteer base to make something like that happen at our school.
This was a great fundraiser. It was easy to do because the Read-a-Thon team helped with every step of the way.
The Lee F. Jackson Read-a-Thon was great. The website is easy to setup and is easy to use.
My Read-a-thon went much better this year than last year but the one complaint I was getting from parents is why are there no books for the students to read on the Read-a-thon site. It would be really amazing if Read-a-thon could partner with another organization like MyOn maybe so that students can put in their Reading Levels and read books on the site and this way the site can track how many books they are reading and minutes. Read-a-thon really only gives students a timer and puts all of the responsibility on them or their parents but I think you would get more funds raised if there were books the students could read on the site already.
We LOVE read-a-thon! It is our easiest, no hassle fundraiser we do. The staff is so supportive and helpful and always willing to answer questions.
This was an awesome experience for our club. The process was very simple and we made so much more than we thought we could. We will definitely make this an annual fundraiser.
Our Read-a-thon was amazing! Simple and easy!
This was our third Read a Thon. We love the program, and will definitely do it again next year. It is such an easy fundraiser for our school's Reading Team and Library! This year we used the instant rewards model, which I like overall, since it rewards both readers and fundraisers. The only thing I would change (if possible) is having a little bit more control over the donation levels when creating the prize sheets. We are a Title I school in a very economically depressed area (more than 80% of our students are eligible for free or reduced lunches), and it is difficult for our students to raise the funds required to earn the prizes in the donation list. I'm getting the impression from students and parents that trying to raise $250/$500/$1000 is nearly impossible for them, is intimidating for them, and turns them off from participating. In fact, only one student in our entire building raised more than $250, and just barely. It would be a welcome change to be able to see a restructured donation level chart that would begin at $10 and end at $250 ($10, $25, $50, $100, $250). I feel like we would have a higher participation level in our school if we could choose those goals that would be more attainable for our low-income students.
Everybody at Read-A-Thon is so helpful and we were able to raise even more money this year. Wonderful!
Overall this has been a great experience! Most of the issues we had with implementation were due to things on our end that will be better next year. I truly appreciate the customer service.
Went very well. Thanks for having such a user-friendly website!
Our Read-a-thon was a great success! We will continue this every year.
It went well.
Kids at Coleman loved participating in this Read-A-Thon! It was our first one and incredibly successful. We stressed minutes read vs. money collected to celebrate and create a habit and love of reading. This was a great and easy way to support our goal.
Our read-a-thon went as well as could be expected as we had started it just before the Covid-19 outbreak. Promoting it and successfully getting it off the ground with remote learning and knowing families were struggling financially did not work in our favor. Under such circumstances though, we did earn some money and are grateful for the Read-a-thon program and the support we did receive from our community. Thank you from all of us at BHCS!
Our Read-a-thon was a wonderful experience. Our students loved adding their minutes to their pages and donations were more than we could have hoped for!
It went well. This is one of the easiest fundraisers. I appreciate that help is always available.
This is our second Read-a-thon and we plan to make it a annual fundraiser for our PTA. We combined the PTA's with the other Elementary schools in town, and this year we were able to almost tripled our first Read-a-thon in donations. Best of all the children were inspired to read over 31,000 minutes. Thanks Read-a-thon.
This was a great experience! I so wish we did not have the Coronavirus shut down school for our students--which made it really difficult to have a big push the second week, no prizes or assemblies where we could really get jazzed for our leader boards!!
This was the easiest fundraiser I have ever done. I will definitely do this again and reccommend it to others.
The Read-A-Thon was a huge success for our small school.
We had a blast. Our kids loved it and their readings skills improved a lot.
Our Read-a-thon went great! It is easy to run and allows for us as a small school to raise funds in a way that promotes our kiddos to love reading! Thank you!
This is a great program thank You ! We love it !
Read-A-Thon is fun, educational and simple way for us to raise money for our school. The students get involved and they enjoy reading to raise money.
Our Read-a-thon was a great hit this year! We were able to raise money to support our school library and we will definitely do our best to make it bigger and better next year. Thanks!
We loved our first Read-a-thon! Such a worthwhile way to raise money for our school.
It was fantastic and the perfect fund raiser for my reading lab.
So fun and very successful
The Read-A-Thon went well - the customer service we received from Tiffany, for any questions we had along the way, was excellent! Thank you.
It went well. This was a great fundraiser for our school. Thank you.
I really enjoyed our experience. This was the easiest fundraiser we have ever done, and the most lucrative! I would have liked a better step by step for how the actual read a thon worked. We were a little unclear on how the student part of reading and sharing that info worked. Other AThons, like jump Athons, you are getting pledges for what you do. This was different. We figured it out, but it would have been helpful to have that better picture at the beginning. Other than that, it was great! We will be doing it again next year!
Good for the first time. Yes we would like to do it again.
I believe this of our third time raising funds with you, this is the easiest and most profitable fundraiser we do all year. Thank you again!
I loved this fundraiser! It would've been nice to have more students participate, but we still have half of the enrollment online only. We will definitely be doing this again!!!
I loved that everything came pre-printed and ready to go. It made it easy for me.
So easy, thank you!
It was simple to run, we enjoyed it!
This was the easiest fundraising ever!
We were disappointed in our cash donations. THis is the first time we have done this so I think that families, although we communicated about this, felt that donations could only be done online. We had our Spanish and Somali Liaisons contact our families multiple times. I believe we only earned 350 in cash donations. This is significantly less than in our previous years, but the online was never a factor so we ended up making a bit less than usual on the readathon as a whole. We are redoing boundaries and our school is growing from 400-600 and retaining only 1/3 of our school population. We may or may not do this again. The new PTO is going to have to make that decision but we will not know until summer at the earliest.
We are so fascinated on how extremely easy this was . Our students have a blast and it was by far the greatest experience we had with reading .
It was great!
Hi, First I love this fundraiser because it remotes reading in young people which is fantastic! And it is a very straight forward and super easy fundraiser which I really appreciated! But unfortunately we didn't do will because of what is currently taken place which is COVID-19 pandemic which is truly unfortune!!! Thank you Shay
It was super easy and we loved the experience. We will definitely be doing this again!
This organization is extremely helpful! We enjoy participating at Central Lake! Thank you so much!
Everything was great. I will be retiring, but I think my school will do this again.
We had a great experience, considering that we started with a small group. I think for future read-a-thon's, it should be more interactive. For example, our group were Middle School and High School, so they should be allowed to use their email address to be able to share on their social media, but still have their parent email connected for sponsors to give donations. Thank you for the experience
This read-a-thon was awesome! Teachers and students enjoyed the process. As the coordinator, it was easy to manage and there was a lot of support from the read-a-thon staff.
We are so pleased!! Thank you for making this an easy, educational way to raise money for our school!
The Read-a-Thon went great! Much more than I anticipated for a preschool!
We are so happy to have found Read-a-thon. It was a simple and yet effective way fundraiser. We are one step closer to our goal of buying a new school bus.
This was a wonderful fundraiser for us. In the past, we have used book fairs to help raise money, but those became very work-intensive with very little profit for our group. We have learned quite a bit during the process and look forward to making this an annual event!
Easy to do. Good returns!
Went well, the kids loved it. Parents loved the ease, they did ask that the mechanism for sharing on social media be looked at for optimization. It was a little confusing and hard to do.
Read-A-Thon is great. I did not promote it as much this year, but the kids were still excited about it.
What an awesome program! It was a huge success at our school. We will use this again!!!
We loved the ease of this fundraiser! Thank you!
Read-A-Thon has been a great annual event to help us kick off our second semester. It is a great way to encourage kids who already have a habit of reading each day and/or to help kids refocus on reading each day to help them finish the school year strong.
This was easy and your staff was wonderful. We can't wait to do it again next year. Some families had issues setting up their pages and making donations but it was cleared up quickly.
Walking into the Read-A-Thon our PTA had no expectations. Our goal was simply to meet our fall fundraiser goal, virtually. This was the best program we've chosen. It was simple to set up, our representative Kari was with us every step of the way. When I say this was not only a great way to fundraise, we saw the excitement in our students and teacher participation. Love, love, love the concept and the ease this brought our PTA during a pandemic we thought would ruin our efforts.
It was pretty great. Thank you for the opportunity. I guess I just wish there was a way to monitor the reading better for students that are logging in at home. Maybe having a teacher give a code for the amount of minutes the student plans to read. Also, a couple students were keeping the sessions open when they weren't reading. We discuss honesty and integrity, but I wish there was a digital way to prevent this from happening. Overall students were honest and loved it. I think many families did as well.
Thank you again, for a super easy way to raise funds for our library! And even better, it's a great way for us to encourage students to read!!
This was a fantastic event for this year since we had to do virtual fundraising. it was a very easy event!
Thought this was a fun and very easy way to raise quick money for our school. Tammy was supportive and very helpful.
I loved this concept! For the first year I think things went very well. Perhaps there could be more pre-event videos that we can send to parents sprior to the start of the fundraiser to get them a little more excited. My students had fun and I loved how we could interact via social media. Thanks for a great first year! I look forward to doing this again next year!
Our read-a-thon went great
I thought it was awesome for our first time. We will definitely be conducting another Read a Thon. Thanks.
Once again, we met our goal and it was not too hard to do. The ease of the Read-a-Thon is welcoming. Students were excited and the school was buzzing about it for sure. The videos and website are supportive and easy to navigate.
It was so much fun for our school! It encouraged our students to read!
This is the best fundraiser next to gofundme ever! I cannot wait to do this again next year (hopefully in person). Thank you for making this available to public schools where funds are always desperately needed.
This has been the easiest fundraiser we’ve ever done. The girls had the added benefit of bettering themselves through reading and learning. Thanks for making it great!
This was an effortless fundraiser that encouraged reading - it was fantastic!
I am shocked at how well this Read-a-thon went for our school! This is the most money we've raised since I have started leading March is Reading Month at my school a few years ago. Everything was easy and this process made it easier for families and community members to donate.
I thought the experience was great. You guys have it so organized that it was easy to do. The only feedback I would give is that the paperwork that was send home the week before had Spanish on the back but the paperwork that went home the day it started does not have Spanish on the back. If they could both have Spanish on the back that would be great. Thank you for all the touching base via email that went on before and during the event.
It was an awesome way to fundraise! Looking forward to doing it again soon!
The Read-a-Thon site worked well for readers and their sponsors, and it was a successful fundraising campaign for the PTA. Printed materials could include a lot more details explaining the goals, start and end dates, suggested "pitch" lines for the kids, etc.
We are blown away by how easy it has been to run a fundraiser through Read-A-Thon! We have at least doubled the amount of money raised in any other fundraiser we've done in the past year (or longer), and it was SO MUCH EASIER! Customer service was wonderful. Tiffany did so much to help set up our event, enter our students, and make sure we always had what we needed. The only problem we had throughout the Read-A-Thon was that some students continued to show up on our prize list after they had already received their prize. Not a big deal though! We kept track of who received prizes, and if we didn't catch it, students were very honest about having already gotten a prize. Students, teachers, and parents have all enjoyed participating, and we will definitely be making this an annual fundraiser for our school PTA!
Loved how easy it was!!!
GLOBE Charter School enjoyed another Read a Thon. Thank you for your support in helping improve student reading and our school.
The students and I enjoyed the read-a-thon. I will be doing this fundraiser again next school year, never have I found something so easy for both the students and myself.
This was my very first Read-A-Thon and I cannot wait until our next one. What a wonderful way to encourage and promote reading at home and at school!
Loved it! So easy and soooo glad the handouts were printed by Read-a-Thon instead of having to do it myself!
This fundraiser was great! The support was awesome and very helpful :)
Thank you. Our students and teachers really enjoyed participating in the read-a-thon. Our expectations were met and exceeded. We will definitely be able to purchase the technology and STEM material needed for our students. Thank you to all the parents and sponsors that helped make this possible.
We loved how easy it was to have the Read-A-Thon. We will be using this again next year
Through the pandemic, the support staff was extremely helpful. I had to try to figure out a way to notify students of the closing out of the readathon fundraiser who were not in the same classroom that they were in when it started. The representative that we have been working with generated a report that made it easy for me to figure that information out.
We loved the Read-a-Thon! This was such a great and easy way to raise money for our school. We can’t wait until our next Read-a-Thon!!!
Our Read-a-thon went great! We will definitely do it again. Having all the information printed for us was a huge help! We also really liked the user-friendly administrator web page to access minutes and donations.
We loved the read-a-thon and we will definitely participate next year.
Last time we did the Read A Thon we raised just over $700. This time, we raised a whopping $2018!!! We are super excited to be able to purchase more reading materials for our school!
It was successful and the students really enjoyed it!
We had a wonderful experience with Read-A-Thon! Kari helped us every step of the way and was fantastic! She was a huge help and answered all of our many, many questions right away. We raised more money than a lot of our board members expected and believe it will be even better next year when we pursue business sponsors. Looking forward to doing another Read-A-Thon next year.
It went great! The students read a lot of minutes.
It went great! The students read a lot of minutes.
Super Easy, will definitely do it again!
Very easy and a great way to raise funds for our school, especially in these COVID 19 times where traditional activities are not possible!
We had great success again this year. Our initial papers to send home did not have student names printed on them. That caused some problems, but we were able to re-print pages with names on them.
We love using read a thon as our one and only fundraiser for the school year!! Thanks!!
Well... that was easy! For about 2 hours (at most!) of work on my end, we've earned $1800 from a very small number of students. Of our 400 kids, only 80 sent out invitations... and we STILL earned that amount. So next year I'll focus on getting kids to send out invites and teaching the teachers how to use their page so they do a better job of putting in the times read. Thanks for this!
It would have been helpful to be able to email parents who had not yet activated their accounts. While our roster had our teachers and students, it did not contain the parent emails. Maybe that was an option that we did not include in the spreadsheet we submitted, but it would have been helpful to have that data included. The reading sessions were very easy to add/edit. Having all the materials printed and sorted and ready to pass out was very helpful.
This has been a great tool for raising much-needed additional funds for our library.
A Read-a-Thon is an easy way for an organization to raise money while promoting the joy of reading.
This was our school's first Read-A-Thon. I think we did a good job. Tiffany was amazing!! She answered all my questions.
We almost doubled our donations from last year. We have learned how to enhance participation and have ideas to increase awareness and involvement even more for next year. The website is is easy to use and the Read a Thon staff are extremely accessible and helpful in answering questions.
This was our PTO’s first year using Read-a-Thon.com and it was a very postitive experience. The website was easy to navigate and understand. We loved the personalized color copies that came to us sorted and stapled by class. This was very helpful and ensured that we got the materials distributed on time.
This was amazing! We raised so much more than I thought we would!!
It was fantastic. The students loved it and we raised the funds we needed!
We tried to expand the Read-A-Thon this year by doing it for two weeks. Unfortunately, we also went on strike as teachers during the first week of the Read-A-Thon. We did not have much teacher enthusiasm for the fundraiser this year, but will try again next year.
The coronavirus outbreak seemed to impact our read a thon. If we do this next year as a school. I believe we will see better results.
Overall, we had a great experience with the Read-a-Thon. The interest in reading went up tremendously. Students and teachers loved the reading time during the day.
This was fantastic! We got the kids reading and raised money for our amazing school. We will definitely be doing this again!
It was easy and the support center was helpful with my questions. We will definitely do this again.
Pinewood Parent Club loves the ease of the Read-A-Thon as a whole school fundraiser. The option for student/participation prizes and printed materials provided by the Read-A-Thon program is helpful.
This is a great way to raise money to support initiatives at your school! This is the second year we have conducted a Read-A-Thon and it has been extremely successful.
Great experience! Thank you!
Our Read-a-thon was a great success! We will definitely be doing another round next year.
This was the best fundraiser we have ever done. Our kids, staff and parents loved it!
This really encouraged our students to read more and got them excited about reading!
As a first-time fundraiser, we feel it was successful and helped create excitement about reading. We are a small school, and we are pleased with our results. We look forward to scheduling it again next year (and hopefully with no Coronavirus disruptions). Thank you, Sissy Revord
It was definitely the easiest way to raise money for our school. We plan to have another one next year but at the beginning of school. We had too many fundraisers going on and this inhibited our amount raised. I got lots of feedback from teachers that they liked how easy it was to use. It's an awesome program. I have recommended it to another media specialist in our district. She plans to do one next school year. Thank you Read-A-Thon! My rep was so helpful!!!!
We love this fun raiser. The only thing we had problems with were parents not realizing that they needed to have their kiddos shop with their Rat Bucks.
It was the easiest and the most educational way to raise funds for our school.
This was a great program that was easy to use. I love how you all stayed in contact with me throughout the entire process. Thank you. We will definitely be using this program again!
please add to show top students or readers on the main page. And a reward sheet for the students to view on their personal page. A lot of parents lost their first flyers where the rewards were listed
This worked great for our school as our first ever fundraiser. All of the staff at Read-A-Thon were extremely helpful answering any questions we had and making sure we were as successful as possible!
We loved it! It was so easy and fun for the kids!
This was an awesome experience for our school. We really look forward to doing this again next year.
Read-a-thon is one of the best fundraisers I have ever done! It is so easy to run, fun and exciting for the kids, and profitable for our school! I would highly recommend a read-a-thon to any school! Thank-you Read-a-thon for providing a simple way to raise money and promote literacy at the same time!
Our Read-a-thon went very well. It is easy to run for great returns. I like that the Read a thon admin covers everything for us, even sorting and sending the prizes. I also like that the directions on the website are easy to follow and have videos for when I needed extra support.
We were pleased for our first year. Our teachers and parents were a little confused as what exactly to do but next year we will have a better understanding. So far overall great event.
We LOVE Read-A-Thon. Their website is super simple for families to use and donate. Our favorite part about Read-A-Thon is that it's a fundraiser combined with reading. A great way to get parents interested in the importance of reading with their child! Thank YOU!
We try our best during these hard times didn't reach our goal but that was ok.
The process was simple and effective. Kari was super helpful.
This was a GREAT first year use of the Read-a-thon program. We look forward to next year and hopefully to raise even more money for our non-profit school! The students enjoyed the whole experience and seeing their reading goals get accomplished was incredible!
This is the first time we held this fundraiser. Although we did not reach our fundraising goal we have learned some things we need to improve upon on our end.
I was very pleased with the success of our read-a-thon. I cannot wait to try it again next year. This really encouraged our children to read and to become excited about reading.
Our Read-A-Thon went better then would could have imagined. We hoped to make a couple hundred dollars for our school garden and ended up with $1670 minus your companies 20%. Our children read 21,967 minutes over those two weeks. Can't wait to receive the proceeds to order supplies for our garden.
The Read-A-Thon was such a great fundraiser! We always encourage students to read over holiday breaks anyway, so this is definitely a win-win! It was easy to set up and manage.
This was awesome! Thank you!
We Love Read-a-Thon!
Everything was smooth. I loved the constant communication and the organization of the website.
For a first go it went okay. We had some glitches in promoting but the platform is simple and user friendly.
I loved the process! It was simple and easy and the students did great. Thank you so much! Improvements would be scripted announcements that could be used daily, scripted facebook posts and all-call messages.
The simple, straightforward, and easy to follow step by step instructions made the Read A Thon a breeze to manage. Even the cash donations were easy to manage. Our only problem was buy in from students who were leery of forwarding emails to their contacts. A bit more promotion on the part of the staff could have made a big difference.
We love raising readers and money for our library each year. Thank you, Read-a-thon!
It really went better than we expected this school year. We only have 34 students and made over $1300 - Maxwell Pre-K Rocks!
Fabulous event- super easy to use and the kids loved it!
It went very smoothly. Thanks for all your help and advice.
Our inaugural Read-A-Thon was a big hit with our students. We plan to host a Read-A-Thon at the start of each school year using www.read-a-thon.com. We were pleased with the support we received to troubleshoot system bugs and we look forward to a more productive run next school year.
I was so impressed with how smoothly everything ran.
We are pleased with this fundraiser. I am hoping that we have better participation in the future. The materials provided were awesome. Is there a way you could add a thank you for participating letter? I have received feedback from both teachers and parents. Parents said the dashboard was not as user friendly as they would like it to be. Many were turned off because the first number listed to donate was $30 and they had to dig deeper to find the smaller options. They also felt that it did not tie into the child's reading enough. I asked what they meant by that, and they said it was more of a just give me money kind of thing. The teachers suggested that the flier going home have examples of prizes in the store. We do a similar type fundraiser that has this feature. Overall it was a very good experience.
We think our Read a thon went very well. We have raised much needed money for our students and classrooms. Thank you so much!
We had a great time with the read-a-thon while it lasted! Students and parents who were able showed a great amount of participation! Just a thought...is there a way to have a second option for students who cannot create an electronic page because of no internet at home? I mentioned the cash donations...but as far as getting the information out to other family members to make them feel included. Thanks for a great read-a-thon!
The Read-a-thon went really well for our first time. I am already looking forward to next year. Now that our staff knows what to expect and do, we will be more successful.
I love the ease of this fundraiser! This fundraiser has helped me focus on what is truly important...student literacy. Thank you!
Thanks to all of the fabulous families that donated and the amazing kiddos that read all year!
I will start by saying that we raised more money than I ever anticipated. This was definitely an elementary event and I wish that would have been made clearer in the beginning. The prizes and videos are a bit "cheezy" for middle school students.
We are so pleased with the ease of this fundraiser!
This has been an awesome experience! Thanks so much!
Thank you for a great fundraiser. Very successful and simple to use.
I feel like it went well.
The kids really enjoyed getting prizes for both money earned and reading minutes. We had more participation then last year. This is our second year and we have found it is an easy and fun way to earn money for our school!
Our read-a-thon went awesome. We used additional incentives that really helped boost our minute tally. I loved the changes through the administrator site to be able to add minutes and access the other teacher's dashboards when necessary. Also, the inability to log in time at home before the start date. LOVE. My only thing that I would change would be to give the teachers the ability to add a single reader session for the students that use a paper log; rather than just an administrator. Another successful year!
You guys were great! It was just a hard time for a small school with COVID numbers.
It went well. Easy to operate. We just struggle geeting all students to create a webpage and sharing through social media. We have a very small percent of students who raise the money for the Read-A-Thon.
Thank you to ALL of the Read-A-Thon crew, especially Tiffany and Colby, for your support, help, and willingness to help our Read-A-Thon fundraiser for Zane North PTA. It was very nice to work with such a great team and know our questions are always answered in such a short time with detailed answers. We look forward to working with you again next year for Read Across America Week! Take care! Sandra Nesbitt Treasure Zane North PTA 2017-2018
Great experience! Thank you!
We loved the Read-A-Thon!!! Thank you for providing this opportunity. We plan to take advantage in the future, please don't go away.
Awesome !
I was very pleased with our read-a-thon for our very first fundraiser ever!. My building is a preschool building and we are just introducing families to a positive school experience and this one was easy and educational! Thank you!
We loved the read-a-thon. It would be nice if administrators could leave updates/posts on the school group page. I also think it would be nice if supporters could view the school group page as well as the student's page.
Torrington Christian Academy loved this fundraiser and we intend on using Read-A-Thon again in the future.
It was awesome!! Thank you so much for the opportunity. We will be doing it again next year.
Tiffany was great. I am doing two fundraisers at the school right now and I never could have done it without her.
Read-A-Thon was an enjoyable experience for our students. We are looking forward to doing it again next year!
We love it !!! It’s been our fourth year doing it for our small center !!! Each year we passed our goal !
The Read-a-Thon was a new experience for our families and while I was not expecting to do as well as our traditional fall fundraiser, we did much better than anticipated. I believe that next time we'll do better as a whole at promoting this as a fundraiser to our families and not just a reading competition and we will continue this as an additional fundraiser for our school going forward.
We love doing the read-a-thon. It is such an easy fundraiser and we love promoting reading.
Super Fun
It went great!
It was fantastic! We loved the experience and will definitely do it again. We raised $1,220 for our campus which is HUGE!
This was the easiest fundraiser our Homeschool Co-Op has ever participated in! The kids were eager to read to earn a pajama day. They also reached their fundraising goal so the Co-Op board members will play egg roulette at lunch one day! A messy end to a wonderful experience.
Read-A-Thon made it simple and stress free fo our Early LEarning Center. This was the first read-a-thon that we have done and cannot wait to incorporate another into our annual plan. Thank you!
As always, easy to navigate and great fundraiser! Thanks!
Great fundraiser. The only problem was in the beginning the teachers did not match up with the students. Unable to tell where the problem generated from. Other than that things went great, can't wait until the next one!
We are a very small school. For the first time doing something like this we really enjoyed it. Thanks
The Read-a-Thon went well. It would be easier for students to log in if the passcodes were shorter or maybe if they could create their own passcode when they set their pages up. I had to give out the passcode several times for many students.
Our students and families love Read-A-Thon. Reaching our reading goal is lots of fun!
Our Read-A-Thon went beautifully! We really enjoyed the process. The kids had a great time, and their families were so proud of their readers!
We Love Read-A-Thon. Our kids are getting super motivated reading. They doubled their reading time since the last one we did and we we able to raise money as well. They are gearing up for next year’s already.
Thanks to the Read a thon platform, I am able to raise funds without asking the families enrolled in my program to attempt to sell anything. We are able to promote literacy between parents and children and support the program at the same time. As an in home preschool program it is hard to find programs like this who remember that in home programs are early education professionals and that we deserve to be supported. Thank you to read a thon for remembering ALL educators and supporting our ability to provide high quality education.
We absolutely loved this low maintenance fundraiser. It was educationally driven, and easy to manage. We will definitely do it again next year!
Love supporting literacy in young children while raising money for playground renovation.
Super easy. Will definitely do again.
The students love it and love getting their rewards.
It went fine for those who participated
Our students have loved the read-a-thon.
Baypoint Preparatory Academy- San Diego had a great time!!
This is the best fundraiser for our school. It is so easy to do. I would recommend to others.
It was very easy fundraiser. With our school I believe we will need to attack the fundraiser from a different angle and offer a cash and check donation as well as online. I believe with our school we would have better luck doing it this way.
The Read a Thon is a wonderful idea however given our distance learning environment, it was rather challenging to get students to participate. We are a small school that typically does well with cash and carry fundraisers. We’re glad we tried and perhaps will try again once we are back on campus. Thank you to Tiffany for her awesome support!
We are so thrilled with how supportive our school family was this year. We raised money to purchase new bikes and other classroom materials. This is a wonderful and rewarding event/program!
Read a thon went great. Yes we would participate in another one if our boss let us.
Thank you for this fabulous opportunity to easily raise money for our library. It was awesome!
We decided to try the Read-A-Thon because it was a no out of pocket expense fundraiser, and we were not expecting to raise the money we did. The Read-A-Thon support staff was wonderful to work with and they were on top of everything. We will defiantly do this again and would recommend it to anyone.
We raised $720.00 that will go into our 3rd grade account for future field trips and parties! We LOVE Read-a-Thon!
We had a great experience with this Read-A-Thon. We have discussed this with our admin and think it would be great to do school-wide next year.
It was an amazing Read-A-Thon and we have had a great success in donation. We are so happy to have this program to help us fundraise for our school.
This was a fun way to engage students to read and help raise funds. Thank you for the platform and hope to use it again in the future.
We loved doing this. It was a Great way to encourage reading at the same time as raising money. Everything was so easy.
We absolutely loved it! We believe that the next time we do it we will have much more participation. Watching their friends get the milestone rewards became tantalizing.
The students that did participate really enjoyed the Read a Thon. I will definitely have another next year.
Great experience although I wish there was an option more geared towards homeschool. I know so many families that this would work so well for.
It was an easy process and very user friendly!
It was great. It was an easy way to raise money for our school.
It was super easy. The teachers liked the reading aspects and are willing to participate more in the future now that they have done one.
Such an easy engaging fundraiser. All the work is done for you!
Unfortunately we had poor participation in our event despite hyping it up and posting frequently to our social media. I think the current pandemic has limited the financial support people are giving.
This is a wonderful and carefully organized program. Kari was very prompt and knowledgeable when I had questions.
great experience.
We had a good participation rate. Our PTA created leveled prizes for incentives.
Surprisingly it went better than I expected due to the current situation we are in.
This was our first time using Read-a-thon and the families really seemed to enjoy it. We will definitely be hosting another event next school year! Thank you for making this available to us.
I was skeptical having a read-a-thon at the middle school level. However, I was surprised at how well we did. The kids who participated enjoyed it, and it was very easy to run. I will be doing this again next year!
This was our first Read-a-thon! We loved it! We ca't wait to do it again!
Went pretty well until school closed in March. After that, participation was little to none.
The Read-A-Thon was great. Sorry it took so long to close out.
Amazing experience! Cant wait to do it again!
Our read-a-thon went great for our very first one. The only thing that I would have liked is if I could have posted to Facebook as my school, but the way that you had the parameters set I could only post as myself
Thank you for a great fundraiser. It all went well!
The program itself is wonderful and simple to understand. I am very disappointed by the lack of participation from the RRLS Families. We will be participating again next year with hopefully a better participation. Reading is truly fundamental. Thank you all for what you are trying to do to promote reading on a daily basis.
We loved the ease of the Read-A-Thon. The children enjoyed the experience and we believe parents liked having an easy way to help out the school!
This was the best program we have ever used.