EP 74: School Fundraising Through Reading with Readathon

Positioning review: No significant adjustments needed. Content is naturally conversational and experiential. Guest describes her own platform and approach. Handbid references are organic mentions of the hosts' own product in context of peer-to-peer fundraising parallels. Minor filler words removed throughout.

Jeff: Welcome to Elevate Your Event, your favorite podcast for transforming fundraising events. Join us weekly for expert tips and creative ideas to make your next event a standout success. Today, we're diving into the world of school fundraising with Stephanie Davern from Readathon. We'll be talking all about how to get kids excited about reading while also raising some serious funds. From digital challenges to friendly competitions, we'll explore how Readathon is making it fun and easy to raise money one page at a time.

Jeff: Welcome back to the Elevate Your Event podcast. We talk about all the various ways you can make your fundraising event better and more fun. So we went out and we did a huge search for fun and look, we found Stephanie Davern from Readathon. Is that right?

Stephanie: I never knew I would be introduced as a fun person, but I'm going with it.

Jeff: Well, we've been chatting since we started this podcast, and you guys missed all the best stuff. Lots of fun. We talked about everything. It's over. We're done. Stephanie, we are so pleased to have you on the podcast. Go ahead. Give us a little bit of background on yourself and your business and what you guys do.

Stephanie: Stephanie Davern with Readathon, as you so kindly introduced me. I've been in education and fundraising since I can't even remember when. And as you hit your 50s, maybe that's a good thing, I don't know. But I've been in fundraising forever and ever. I love education. My mom was a teacher. So just growing up, I was always surrounded and immersed with books and loved it. And through happenstance, because I went down a different path after school -- I was a mechanical engineer in turbo machinery.

Jeff: That means fun.

Stephanie: Is it not? If you're like, yeah, how do you go from that? And ended up at a book event for Scholastic. And when I was there, they said, oh, you seem to really like reading. And we need somebody that likes reading to fill in for a role that we need. And it kind of launched everything from there because they were looking for somebody to work with nonprofits. And I love working with nonprofits in schools. And so there it began. And through my journey it brought me, it's kind of a series of happenstance, to Readathon, which I'm thrilled and I love and it's amazing and it just makes me happy every single day.

Stephanie: So Readathon -- I feel like we're changing the whole narrative and making a generational change within the space. So kids, the school signs up. Kids are encouraged to read, which is such a fundamental thing these days, all the way across.

Jeff: I would agree. Do you feel like it's a lost thing with some of the generation this day and age?

Stephanie: That's a great question. I think it's changed, right? So we're in this digital age where people are on their devices constantly, as we were talking about before about not having your phone on. And so I think people are, number one, reading differently. I think they're listening to podcasts and other great ways of learning how to read. But I think people kind of lose sight of just sitting down with a good book. You love reading. You love the smell of it. You love the feel of it. And for kids especially, when they're introduced to technology so early, they're not learning how to read in the same way that we all did, right? There's spot reading across a device. And I think people are just stretched these days too. They're running to sports. They're going to school. They're working different jobs. And the focus isn't on that. It's on everything else. And then reading comes as kind of this ancillary extra thing.

Jeff: Yeah, when you're spending so much time on your phone with social media and Snapchat, how do you have time to read a good book? I mean, that's what I tell my kids, for sure.

Stephanie: Exactly. They are really good at taking selfies. If you could commit that much time to reading, they'd be masters of reading. But yeah, I mean, I think in general it's just changed. And I think when we talk about fundraising specifically, there's so many different types of fundraising these days. And being able to bring a fundraiser back to having an educational focus and having it pair with what you're doing in school and being supportive of that -- versus, hey, we're selling a product and now when we're selling this product you need to go do this outside of school and come pick it all up. Or we're having a jog-a-thon or something like that where it's taking out of the school day instead of really supporting it.

Jeff: Yeah. We used to call ourselves one of the healthiest school fundraising options out there because we're not getting people fat on popcorn or anything else, right? And so I have to put you in too, right? So you run a school auction -- it's not like you can burn some calories, maybe a little bit. But you're not consuming calories. And if you're reading, you're doing the same thing.

Stephanie: I love it. I agree. You're only growing your brain. It's funny. Move-a-thons, jog-a-thons, readathons -- I love all of those things. They get people active and going. But hey, if you want to sell wrapping paper and popcorn and all that other kind of stuff, I suppose there's some schools that still like to do that. It seems expensive to me, too, though. It's a lot of work.

Jeff: Yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of like, okay, well, what am I getting for my money? And in this one, I think it's kind of invaluable. You're getting your education. You're supporting education. You're getting smarter people that are going to end up being smarter in the long run, and then that's going to help you so that they can run an auction one day.

Stephanie: That's right. So is Readathon like a software? How does it work?

Jeff: So when the school signs up, right, they give us all their information. We don't ask for any student data. We want to make sure that we're respectful of privacy and data privacy laws. And when the school signs up, they have a dashboard. So they can see everything -- reading minutes from the student level all the way up to the school level. Kids with their families, they sign up and activate their accounts. And from there, they can see an entire dashboard. They can see their reading minutes and their goal. They can log reading sessions. They can enter them after the fact. They can share out that information with family and friends all over the world. So I think digital has really made it global. And then friends and family from all over the world through email, text, and social can donate to them. And in fact, we have the ability for a teacher during the day to log a classroom reading session on that dashboard, and it will enter each of the respective students' accounts. So really trying to make it a holistic, global feeling event where it's not putting the onus on the parents anymore. And it's not putting the onus on volunteers. I mean, you guys have found that probably in your industry has changed over the past few years.

Jeff: Yep. For sure. Yeah, look, I mean, you've got to make it simple and easy for people to get involved. Not a lot of work on their side except for the reading part -- they should. So is it minutes based or is it pages?

Stephanie: So interesting question. What would you think it would be?

Jeff: Well, I could tell you what it was when I was in elementary school. It was the number of pages you read.

Stephanie: Right. And so everybody would, when it was pages, read these really easy books because then you logged as many pages as you could. So we really want kids to read for fun and enjoy it. And I always say, find that just-right book. So we do it on minutes because we want to make sure that kids are reading just for the sake of reading. And we even count if a parent is reading to them or if they're doing other activities that the school defines as learning how to read. Because not every student reads and learns how to read in that traditional way. Right. So I always use my kids, who are now grown and very large, tall children. But my daughter was an avid reader and she's dyslexic. So she learned in a very different way than my son, who was like, all I want to do is read a quick snippet in the Guinness Book of World Records. And then I would like you to tell me about what else I should know. And then as we're going down the road, we're going to play the alphabet games. So that's how he learned. It's a little different.

Jeff: Yeah.

Stephanie: So I think it also encourages that time with family. Families have shifted in their dynamics too. And so if you can encourage that time that you just commit 20, 30 minutes a day to that, that makes a difference. And you can even have a parent that maybe is transitionally literate, right? They haven't learned how to read yet or they're in the process. They can still teach a child to read. Do a book walk. Look at the pictures and walk them through and create your own stories. So I think there's a lot of different ways, but we really want it to be all-inclusive, right? Anybody can participate. And in fact, we don't charge anything for our platform. So if a student wants to just read and not do any donations, they can still participate.

Jeff: That's awesome. I think very important. I was going to say, if you weren't going to do minutes, I'm going back to a little bit of the trauma I had in third grade where I would -- I'm not going to brag, but I would read probably a little bit more complicated books. And when it was by pages, I had people that had three lines of text on a page and read hundreds of these books. And so I was like, you kind of need a weighting algorithm on these books. Well, if you're going to read Moby Dick, it's worth like five times, right? And then you get the multiplier on yours, and then everybody that's pledging has to multiply that out. That's the engineer in me trying to figure out a way to make it fair. Or to incentivize you actually reading better stuff.

Stephanie: I mean, it's funny. Watching my kids grow up and looking at how they all learned differently and what they can tolerate -- my oldest filled my entire Kindle account with books. He would prefer to read them on a device. Whereas my youngest, who really does struggle a lot with reading, she's not a fast reader, she wants the physical book. She also listens to the audio book at the same time.

Jeff: Oh, wow.

Stephanie: And she goes along at a much slower pace, but she loves it. And she reads way more than any of my other kids combined. So it is fascinating to see people's different learning styles and creating ways to accommodate them, I would think.

Jeff: Well, I was asking before this -- well, is there any proof that they've done it?

Stephanie: Oh, yeah. I used to walk up and down the halls in third and fourth grade going, there is no way that kid read 100 pages last night. And that's what I mean. There is always, I say, in every single school, there is that one student that learns and figures out, oh, here's what I can do in order to kind of cheat the system. And normally you can tell, right? It's the one kid that logs 180 minutes every single night without fail. And it's just the same time. And we actually have a cap that we can put on a readathon amount of minutes for a school specifically because of that. But then you'll get kids -- it's really hard because you'll get a student that loves it.

Jeff: Yeah.

Stephanie: I mean, we give away a Disney trip twice a year for participating schools. And it's really fun. I feel very lucky. I get to go out and see this. And I get to make the phone call where people are crying and so happy. But we just had in December or January when we did the drawing, we had a family and the little boy is dyslexic and they're like, it was painful. And his parents were actually tearing up as they were on camera talking to us about it. And the dad was crying. He's like, five minutes was -- you could see the pain and the struggle with him. And then they were just identifying that he was dyslexic. And the little boy spoke so eloquently about it. And then what we found out is they go, and then Readathon comes along, right? And we're like, oh, this is going to be a disaster. Now he's going to have to read to help support the school. Well, he found the one prize that he really wanted. And we have a couple prize options or profit options. We have a prize store, or we have where the school can come up and sponsor their own types of rewards. And he wanted this one prize -- I don't even remember what it was. And his dad's like, well, then you're going to have to read in order to get people to donate to do that. And he read like 3,805 minutes.

Jeff: Oh, wow. So you just find the motivation. I think Readathon just gives people that outlet. Now, when I'm involved in a readathon, can I see what my classmates, how many minutes they've read? Is there a little bit of a leaderboard there?

Stephanie: So in a class, the teacher can see the classroom. The admin of the entire school can see everybody. And the student can only see their own. However, most schools get pretty crazy creative. And they will do things like classrooms that are in the lead, and they get to mark a book for every X number of minutes, and they have these different leaderboards going. They'll go on the announcements. We have all the reporting done for them. So they'll go and say, Stephanie's class is beating Jeff's class right now in both minutes and donations. Sorry to say. And then you'll hear these screams down the hall. And the next day, somebody else will take the lead.

Jeff: I love that. I mean, obviously, you could do student to student, that makes it a little bit harder for certain students, right? Especially on the donation side. But doing it at the classroom level can build some teamwork inside of the classroom, some pride. And look, we have a peer-to-peer fundraising platform. And the part about it that makes it the most successful is the fact that there's competition built into it. Because what you described with that one young kid -- there's an incentive, right? And so the incentive drives behavior.

Stephanie: Well, what do you see as the biggest motivator? How are people motivating other groups to do even better?

Jeff: It literally is competition. There's always a feel-good element to fundraising, right? There's no doubt about that. You're going to an event. You have the speech. You talk about the organization. You draw some tears out of some people. That will motivate certain people to give. But what is equally, if not more powerful, is when someone raises their hand because they're donating $250 and you get an elbow in your side saying you've got to do it too. It's that type of stuff. So it's the competition. And the auctions, right? It's why you have to make the bidding process interactive and fun. So our app is designed to vibrate, play sounds, throw confetti when you're winning -- do all the things that are going to say to somebody, I'm winning. And the best part is at the end when they say, I was not planning on spending this much money.

Stephanie: I was at a fundraiser for a nonprofit that I'm on the board of. Every time a donation came in, they physically announced it and went over to that person. And they look at everybody else at the table and be like, so where is yours? And they raised $40,000. It was truly just like, hey, if this person can do it, why can't you? Whether it's auction style or peer to peer, it is, I can do this, can you do this too?

Jeff: When we first got started with Handbid back in 2011, we would have people that would say to us, I only want people physically at my event to win the item. And I'd be like, why do you want to do that? There's two advantages to people not coming. One, they're still bidding. And two, they don't cost you any money because they're not eating your food and drinking your drinks. But it took a while for people to get over that and realize the other part of it is actually raising money. And you have to maximize those opportunities.

Stephanie: I think COVID really shifted how people felt comfortable with online fundraising. With Readathon, that was a time our business grew exponentially. And then as things went back to normal, it stayed that way because they realized you can have people remotely and make just as much money, if not more.

Jeff: I think a lot of our schools figured that out. Even if you didn't make as much, when you looked at how the math worked out, you probably netted as much, if not more.

Stephanie: I always say to people, what's your risk? There is literally no risk. We send you everything. You have to sign up, I guess. That's your biggest lift.

Jeff: So how does Readathon make money?

Stephanie: We take a small percentage on the back end. We're covering processing fees. We're doing all the printing. They don't pay for shipping. There is legitimately no upfront cost.

Jeff: I hate the tipping model. I find that so deceiving. I have so many friends that are donors that have no idea where that money actually goes. By the way, it doesn't go to the charity, for those that are listening. I like the model you're creating. Look, you win, we win.

Stephanie: We've been starting a referral program now where if you want to share it out with other schools and tell them about your success, we'll give you a thank you. That peer referral is word of mouth. It's very important.

Jeff: Hey, a question for you. Do you guys do streaks too, or is it just minutes?

Stephanie: No, we just do minutes. Straight on minutes right now. But that's a great idea. We should.

Jeff: All I hear about from adolescents these days is their Snapchat streaks. You could do bonuses on like a 10-day streak, 15-day streak, 20-day streak.

Stephanie: It does build a habit too. We know 20 days starts a habit. I will say any time it involves something disgusting, that tends to motivate kids pretty well. One school did -- for every class that reached their reading and donation goal, they got to choose one disgusting thing that the principal had to eat.

Jeff: That is a brave principal. That reminds me of the ice bucket challenge.

Stephanie: A lot of times the gym teacher or the phys ed teacher has to be the one involved. They're like, we're going to make the phys ed teacher kiss a pig. We're going to duct tape them to the wall.

Jeff: This has been an amazing conversation. What it boils down to is make it easy. Make it easy for the schools, the donor, the students, the parents. But also get some element of competition in there to drive that behavior.

Stephanie: If you can have fun doing it and make it easy for everybody, then it's just that win, win, win all the way across.

Jeff: How do our viewers get in touch with Readathon if they're interested?

Stephanie: They can call us. They can go to our website, readathon.com. They can always email me at sales at readathon.com. They can chat with us. And they can Google Readathon, and I guarantee we'll be the first ones coming up.

Jeff: All right. Sounds good. Get on a readathon. Start reading. Start getting those kids to read some better books. Happy fundraising.

Jeff: If you enjoyed our show, please take a moment to leave us a review. You can find us on Apple, Google, and Spotify. Don't forget to subscribe for more great content. And if you're a fan of video, check us out on YouTube. Until next time, happy fundraising.