Spring of 2020, I was a scrambling librarian trying to figure out the best way to give my patrons a fun, accessible Summer Reading Program.  I am so glad that I found Reader Zone!  I had a few questions and their customer service gets an A+ from me.  Not only were my questions answered, I had received a personal video tutorial from Jake.  I had received emails letting me know about aspects of the program that I wasn’t always aware of, so those were also helpful.

The Reader Zone app was easy to use and they provided tutorials and marketingmaterials that made the process easy for my patrons.  Once my summer program started, it was simple to check the progress of my patrons.  I could see how we were doing as a whole or as each group.  

When I wanted to remind all the participants that the Summer Reading Club Finale was coming up, it was easy to get an email out to all those signed up.  One thing I was concerned about was if email addresses would show up when sending a bulk email (I know I could have asked Reader Zone but I decided to do a test email with my staff).  I was happy to see that there weren’t any email addresses visible to other patrons.

The usability, accessibility and customer service were enough to win me over but they are also reasonably priced!  My director was pleased that I found Reader Zone because it saved me time and saved us a ton of money.  I highly recommend Reader Zone.

Due to the global pandemic, I needed to move my summer reading challenge from paper logs to a digital format, and I had to do it swiftly.

The Reader Zone program was a perfect solution. It was very easy to create my program, and any questions I had were swiftly answered by the self-help videos or by email, and once even to the company's founder.

I have been using the promotional features regularly to post to social media and on our school website. I am chronicling the steady rise in communal pages read this summer. It is very exciting!

I have never been able to follow the progress of reading over the summer before, and with Reader Zone, I am able to track student progress BEFORE school starts.

This has been a great experience and I will be repeating it next year!

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When we started planning Summer Reading, we were still in Covid-19 lockdown mode and unsure about when we would be back in the building, let alone what Summer Reading was going to look like. We wanted a fun, contactless way for our patrons - kids, teens, and adults - to be able to interact with us while completing reading challenges, and we chose Reader Zone because it had features we appreciated: a user-friendly, easy-to-use app and the ability to create different types of challenges under one program. That it was affordable and Idaho-based was icing on the cake!

We introduced the app to our patrons on social media and through our paper Summer Reading information. We also created a short video to explain how to sign into the app and use its features. We wanted to make this as simple and stress-free as possible, and this helped to flatten out the learning curve. Once they got the hang of it, our community really took to it! We saw an almost 50% increase in the number of adults participating in Summer Reading, and for kids, we saw an uptick in completion rates. Overall, we felt that our Summer Reading experiment with Reader Zone was successful, and we extended our subscription to add more challenges and contests for readers of all ages through the next year.

We were already excited about using Reader Zone for our Summer Reading Program at the Eagle Public Library based on previous discussions with Jake, and the situation with COVID-19 only made our decision that much easier. We had to transition to an all virtual program and Jake and the Reader Zone team made that easy for us. They even took our suggestions, made additions to the app that made evaluating our program even easier, and checked in to make sure the new changes were working for us. We greatly appreciate Reader Zone here at the Eagle Public Library and are excited to be working with a local business!