Summer Reading Challenge Campaign Guide

Summer Reading Challenge Campaign Guide

The Summer Reading Challenge is a way for you to engage with your community and customers over the summer. It’s a simple local challenge – students read some of the books from a recommended reading list (or whichever books they like) and fill in a worksheet to show they have read the books. You can run this challenge in many different ways, but one of the simplest is to run a prize draw. All students who send in their worksheets to you after reading books can be entered into a prize draw.

The Summer Reading Challenge is a low cost marketing initiative, which will: 
  1. Give your students a reason to read this summer
  2. Enhance your reputation within your community 
  3. Give you a reason to stay connected with families even if their children are not being tutored during the summer months.  This will give you a better chance of retaining them as clients when the new school year begins.
  4. Allow you to connect with potential new prospects at events, through schools and most effectively, with referrals.
  5. Generate potential leads that can be nurtured over the summer months for when the new school year begins.
  6. Build up your database of emails for marketing purposes

How to Run the Summer Reading Challenge 

The simplest way to run this campaign in your local community is to run it as a prize draw.
  1. Family signs up & are sent the resources
  2. Student chooses books from our booklist (on website)
  3. Student completes the worksheet and submits to you
  4. Enter all the student names into a ‘hat’
  5. Pick a winner (the winner could be chosen by grade/year/age group level)

Step 1: Get Prepared

  1. Decide on your prize
  3. Get organized with the resources 
  4. Put together your promotional plan
  5. Create sign up form recommend Google Form)
    1. We recommend using Google Forms for this
    2. Be sure to include a section where people can opt in to receive your local promotional emails so you can add them to your email database. 

Step 2: Promote the Challenge

  1. Post on social media  - your own pages & in local community groups
    1. You can also boost your post on Facebook/Instagram to reach more people 
  2. Email clients / database - take a look at the templates available in the Resource Library
    1. Customers – email all current customers to encourage them to take part in the challenge
    2. Your database – email your whole database about the challenge
  3. Local website – include information on your local site. Speak to Scorpion about this. 
  4. Promote at events (you can have paper sign up forms or a tablet available)
  5. School relationships -  offer this challenge for schools to give to their students for free
  6. Business partnerships - ask businesses that you’re partnered with to help promote the challenge to their client base!
NOTE: Make sure all of your promotion communications direct people to your Google Form to sign up for the challenge. Once people have signed up, email them the resources they need (see email templates in Resources)

Step 3: Follow Up with Families

  1. Check in with families / students that have signed up for the challenge
  2. This is a good opportunity to add a plug about summer tutoring / tutoring for back to school
  3. Remind families about the date they need to submit worksheets by
See the follow up email template in the Resources. 

Step 4: Run Prize Draw

  1. Once you've collected all the worksheets from participating students, place all of their names into a 'hat' to draw a winner.
  2. If you have the parents written consent, get a photo of the winning student with their certificate and prize and post this to your social media 

Step 5: Send participation certifications to all students

  1. Be sure to recognize all students the participated in the challenge by sending them a certificate!
  2. This is another touch point with those families, and more often than not, certificates are displayed in family homes with pride on the fridge - increasing the brand awareness of this campaign. 

NOTE: Be sure to add all contacts that opted in to receive promotional emails from you to your email marketing platform so they are included in your local emails

Challenge Resources

Download all the below files for this campaign from the Resource Library:
  1. Recommended Reading List
  2. Completion Certificate
  3. Student Worksheet
  4. Social graphic
  5. Email templates
  6. Google Form header graphic

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