Students read whatever interests them and invite their friends and family via email to make donations based on the number of books or hours they read. Your school keeps 80% of funds raised, there is no door-to-door selling, and it needs only one to two volunteers.

Less than 2 weeks is not recommended because you want students to read as many books as possible. Note that we have seen donor fatigue occur with fundraisers that last longer than 8 weeks. A fundraiser this long may begin to interfere with other activities and obligations such as testing, school plays, and vacations.

September and October fundraisers benefit from back-to-school excitement, while March fundraisers line up well with Literacy Month and Dr. Seuss's birthday.

Specifically, you will need:

• A student roster in excel format with your students' first name, last name (or last initial), grade, and teacher name;
• Start and end dates for your Read-A-Thon;
• Goals for your Read-A-Thon in minutes (How many minutes would you like your school to read?) and dollars (How much is your school hoping to raise?);
• To sync your organization's account with Stripe.com

To accept credit card donations, you will need to sync your organization's bank account to Stripe.com. Once completed, credit card donations deposit directly into your Stripe account. To transfer money from your Stripe account to your organization's bank account you may choose between automatic deposit or a manual transfer. The automatic deposit is on a 2-day rolling basis and the manual transfer is best used if you prefer a lump sum transfer. At the end of the fundraiser, we reimburse you Stripe's processing fee.

We provide the following paper templates to support offline participation:

• Sponsor information sheet - Students can provide information to sponsors they invite in person or through the mail.
• Paper reading log - Students can record their reading and then transfer the information to their student account when computer/internet access is available.
• Paper sponsor sheet - Parents and students can keep track of sponsors and their donations.
• Paper authorization form - Sometimes parents without internet access and/or email addresses will know the email addresses of relatives and friends they want to invite via email. Print and send this authorization form home for a parent signature and return it to Readafun. We will email the sponsor invitations for them.

For example: (20 mins/day)/student x 500 students x 30 days = 300,000 minutes

When planning your event, please consider the following factors, all of which help indicate how much you'll raise:

• Previous fundraising efforts: How much have you raised in the past for jog-a-thons, product fundraisers, carnivals, etc?
• Participation: What percentage of students have participated in past events?
• Timing for your Read-A-Thon: When do you plan to do this? Fall? Summer? Next year? Will this be your major fundraiser or is it supplemental? If this is a last minute fundraiser, will parents have donor fatigue from previous fundraisers this year? Is this something new that everyone will be excited about?
• Teacher involvement: This program is easy for teachers to use. We've found that you'll raise 37% more if just a quarter of your teachers participate!
• Promoting the event and getting parents involved: Parents need to authorize student accounts and help invite sponsors, so explaining and promoting the program to them is essential. We provide printable and video instructions for both parents and students. It is important to note that the fundraisers where parents were heavily involved raised as much as $28,000. Events with minimal parent involvement often raise significantly less.

Once login information is received, students then:

• Go to http://www.readafun.com.
• Click on the green button on the top right hand side of the screen.
• Enter username and password.

Prior to inviting any sponsors, a parent must first authorize their child's account by entering in his or her email address. For a sponsor to have access to the student's account and interact with the child, the parent must approve that sponsor. Sponsors invited via Facebook and other social media will be directed to make a credit card donation and will not have access to the child's account.

When social features are turned off, students will not be able to see each other's profiles, books, and comments. If necessary, specific students can be blocked from commenting, allowing you to keep social features turned on for everyone's enjoyment.

Our fundraiser is designed so that your organization can keep as much money as possible. Since our fee is only 20% we are not capable of providing physical prizes. However, we do provide virtual incentives. Students are represented by an Owl (we call them Owlvatars) and the more students read, write reviews, and invite sponsors, the more wisdom coins they earn. Students use these coins to purchase virtual owl accessories at the Owl Shop.

Since we are a small organization, located in San Diego, CA, we're unable to send our Account Managers to personally visit schools in their home state.

As an edtech (education technology) organization, we pride ourselves in being as 'green' as possible and do not send out physical materials to schools or coordinators.

If the parent chooses to authorize a student's account, the parent will have access to the student's profile and be able to invite sponsors, who will also be able to view the student's profile. The student can request to send invites, but all sponsor invites must be approved by the parent. The only people that have access to a student's reading profile at school are that student's teacher, fundraiser coordinator, and classmates. All data is stored off-site, on industry-standard secure servers. It is important to note that we do not collect any personal information about each student other than first and last name (or last initial) and do not sell any information (including email addresses) to other companies.

Our Read-A-Thon does not require any additional time from teachers. However, we've found that you'll raise 37% more if even a quarter of your teachers participate!