Reach More Readers Challenge
May 1st – May 31st
Get ahead of the summer slide, increase awareness of the WSDLC collections, and maybe even score some Sora swag by encouraging your students to participate in a friendly competition with other schools across the state!
The WSDLC is again hosting a contest aimed at helping member schools try out new methods- and utilize old favorites- for reaching students before they depart for the summer! The idea and hope is to reacquaint students with the digital collections that are available to them year-round so they can keep reading all summer long.
What You Need to Do
Every school that joined the WSDLC prior to March 1st 2025 is automatically entered into this competition.
All you need to do is spread the word and get as many students as you can to log in to Sora and check out a title between May 1st and May 31st! It can be a magazine, an audiobook, a graphic novel, anything! If it’s available in Sora and gets checked out, it counts!
Have students practice logging in during library time, schedule classroom visits to share a walkthrough on the Sora platform, or share printed materials. You can find more examples and resources for marketing Sora to your students further along on this page.
Prizes
This year’s winners will receive Sora Swag Bags, filled with items for the winning school’s LMS and stickers and other possible goodies for students!
Grand Prize Winner: Sora Swag Bag
3 Runners-Up: Sora Swag Bag
Many thank yous to OverDrive for sponsoring the Reach More Readers Challenge with these prizes!
How are Winners Determined?
It’s pretty straightforward: the school(s) that have seen the greatest increase in the number of students checking out materials in Sora between March and May 2025 will be declared the winner!
How are we calculating this?
We’re starting with the Unique Users report available in Marketplace Insights: The number of students from each school (based on Advantage accounts) that checked out at least one title during the month of March has been tallied, so we already have a base to start with.
At the end of May, we’ll run another Unique Users report, where the number of students from each school (again, based on Advantage accounts) that checked out a book in May will be counted.
These two totals will be compared, and the school that sees the highest percentage of growth between March and May 2025 will be the winner.
Why percent growth?
There are many reasons why we chose this metric.
For one, we want to help get more of your students accessing the collections!
Another reason is that there is such a wide spread in the number of students enrolled in each member district. Looking at percent-growth gives school districts with fewer than 100 students enrolled and school districts with over 10,000 students enrolled an equal opportunity.
Reach Those Readers: Marketing Tips & Resources
Looking for some ideas on how to reach your students before they leave for the summer and bump up your numbers for this competition? We’ve got you covered!
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Customize this Getting Started with Sora One-Pager
Share OverDrive’s Getting Started with Sora handout with your students: add it to school newsletters; ask teachers to share it with their students; tuck it in with physical books that students checkout during library time; print it out and include it in library displays.
WSDLC’s setup code is: wsdlcwi
OR
If sharing digitally you can either:
Link directly to the WSDLC’s Sora page: https://soraapp.com/library/wsdlcwi
OR
Link directly to your district’s login page(s)! Go to the WSDLC’s Sora page, search for your district/school(s), click, and share the login page’s link with your students!
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Curate Collections to Draw Students In
Getting students to log in to Sora is step one, and teaching them to search in Sora is step two. But what’s step three? Discovering titles by browsing, of course! And what better way to browse than looking through curated collections!
As a member of WSDLC you have a choice in what your students see on the Sora Explore page. You can display the WSDLC’s consortium-wide curations, or you can create your own with Advantage (custom) Curation. Curations help students find books that interest them, and curations in the WSDLC are refreshed monthly.
- Sign into OverDrive Marketplace.
- In the Curate drop-down, select Standard curation.
- Look at the “Customize Advantage collections” toggle:
NO means your Advantage Curation is turned off, and students are viewing the WSDLC’s curations.
YES means your Advantage Curation is turned on, and students are viewing your schools’/districts curations. (They will not be able to view consortium-wide curations.) - If you’d like to update your settings, select the other option; then in the pop-up, click Save to confirm.
Note: Updating from Yes to No will clear any collections that you customized for Sora, and your collections will match the shared collection/consortium’s again.
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Use QR codes!
We’ve created QR Codes that will take students directly to some of the WSDLC Curated Collections! You can use these with your own marketing materials, or in customizable marketing materials from OverDrive’s Resource Center: add these codes to printable bookmarks, or as flyers to hang in your library, classrooms, hallways, table tents, bathroom stall doors, or anywhere else students may have their phones with them.
QR codes of individual titles or to your school’s Sora log in page are great ideas, too!
Need help creating QR codes? Reach out to WSDLC Project Managers with a list of the curated collections or titles that you want to use, and we can get those QR codes to you.
Past Reach More Readers Challenge Results
2022’s Winners
Grand Prize Winner: Hartford Joint School District #1 — 4,700% increase
First Runner Up: Sun Prairie Area School District – Madison Elementary School — 4,400% increase
Second Runner Up: Crivitz Elementary School — 4,100% increase
Third Runner Up: Sun Prairie Area School District – McDill Elementary School — 2,900% increase
Taking a larger-picture view of 2022’s Challenge:
- A difference of +5,284 more students checked out titles in May over March, equaling a 19% increase across the consortium!
- A difference of +1,124 more new users checked out titles in May over March, equaling a 33% increase across the consortium!
2023’s Winners
Grand Prize Winner: Rosendale Elementary — 12,100% increase
First Runner Up: Oneida Nation School – Elementary — 9,500% increase
Second Runner Up: Baraboo – Jack Young Middle School — 9,400% increase
Third Runner Up: Colby Elementary School — 8,800% increase
Taking a larger-picture view of 2023’s Challenge:
- A difference of +3,521 more students checked out titles in May over March, equaling a 12% increase across the consortium!
- A difference of +895 more new users checked out titles in May over March, equaling a 29% increase across the consortium!
2024’s Winners
Grand Prize Winner: Ellsworth Community School District — 24500% increase
First Runner Up: De Soto Area School District — 6000%
Second Runner Up: East Troy Community SD – Prairie View Elementary — 4500% increase
Third Runner Up: Madison Metropolitan SD – Franklin — 4300% increase
Taking a larger-picture view of 2024’s Challenge:
- A difference of +7,424 more students checked out titles in May over March, equaling a 21% increase across the consortium!
If you have any questions, please reach out to us at wsdlc-info@wils.org