Getting your school set up

Welcome. Here's how to get your school onto PagePledge for the first time. You can sign up and start a free trial straight away, and the setup guide walks you through the rest.

1. Sign up your school

Fill in the school signup form with your school's details and the name and email of your main contact.

2. Click the link in your email

As soon as you sign up, we'll send you a welcome email, subject "Welcome to PagePledge", with your sign-in link. The link works for 24 hours, and there's no password to make. Your account starts as a free trial.

3. Follow the setup guide

After signing in, you'll find the setup guide waiting on your dashboard. It walks you through everything between now and launch day, one step at a time, in the order that works best. Each step says why it matters, what to do, and when to aim to have it done.

Steps are marked Required to launch, Recommended or Optional. Only the required ones stop your campaign from going live. The recommended ones are there because they make the read-a-thon go better, but you can skip any that don't fit your school. Some steps open only once an earlier one is done: you can't invite teachers until there are classrooms to put them in. Steps with a padlock and Locked until paid open once your campaign fee is paid and we've approved the campaign.

4. The steps, in order

Foundations

• Check your school details — your school's name as families know it, and your timezone. The timezone decides when each campaign day starts, so it comes before dates.
• Plan your read-a-thon — dates, what you're raising money for, and goals. We suggest dates with a proper runway, a name to match the season, and a reading goal worked out from your number of students.
• Pay the campaign fee. The free trial covers setting up; running the campaign costs a flat fee. Choose your plan, send the e-Transfer, and we'll approve the campaign. Connecting Square, inviting teachers and launching open up once it's approved.
• Connect Square so donations have somewhere to land. A new Square account has to verify its bank account first, so connect it as soon as your campaign is approved.

People

• Add your students — upload a class list and we'll create the classrooms, the students and everyone's activation codes.
• Invite your teachers and add them to their classrooms. The guide shows which classrooms still need one.
• Add a co-organizer (optional) — a parent council member, your treasurer, or a lead teacher. On the free trial we don't email them an invitation; they sign in from the sign-in page with the email you entered.

Rewards

• School-wide rewards — we suggest a set sized to your goal, which you can change before adding. They're printed on the info and take-home sheets, so they come before those.
• Student prizes (optional) — prizes each student earns on their own, plus top-student awards and prize draws.

Spread the word

• Brief your teachers — a plain-language overview of the read-a-thon and what you need from them, with your dates and prizes. Download it, then email or print it for your teachers.
• Tell families what's coming — what a read-a-thon is, what happens next, your dates and prizes. It goes home the week before the take-home sheets.
• Both sheets open with Customize & download. We've written everything for you: edit any of it, turn off what you don't need, and add a section of your own. The preview shows the actual page, a sheet never runs past one piece of paper, and there's a black-and-white mode for school printers. When it looks right, Download PDF.
• Print take-home sheets — one per student, with the QR code their family scans to join. Aim to have them go home about two weeks before reading starts, once your campaign is approved: families can't activate before then.
• Choose who gets which emails (optional) — PagePledge emails admins, teachers and families when reading starts, with daily or weekly progress, as it wraps up, and with the final results. They're all on to start with; switch off any your school would rather send itself. You can change this later under Settings.

Launch

• The last step is a pre-flight check of everything above. There's no button to press: the campaign goes live by itself early on your start date, as long as it's paid for and approved, Square is connected and your students are in. It also has your school's donation page link, which opens when donations do, along with each student's page.