Our Follett Book eFair Was Such A Hit! Read & Hear All About It Here, Friends.

We just had one of the best book fairs at Van Meter!  In fact, it was the very first Follett Book eFair we had and it was such a huge success with our students, teachers and families.  I can't wait to tell you all about it. 

Book fairs are an important part of our library and school community every year.  They support our readers, bring our families together to celebrate literacy, enrich our library and classroom libraries and so much more. 

With precautions and rules around COVID-19, I was excited to know that my friends at Follett have created a solution for our school community to host a book fair this fall that would include our entire school. 

With Follett Book eFairs, we give all students an opportunity to find books to read no matter where they are and to give them a lot of choice on books they love to read. 

If you remember from this earlier post on my blog, we kicked off our eFair in September.  

We ran it for 3 weeks and it was so much fun to get everyone excited about our eFair in a variety of different ways including reading contests, classroom contests and lots of marketing on our social channels and within the school. 

I loved how Follett kept me up to date throughout the entire eFair.  It made it easy to track of how we were doing and what we had to do to meet our goals.  

One night when we were out to eat, an alert even popped up on my Apple Watch.  How fun is that! 

As soon as our eFair ended, I received an email stating they were preparing our students' order for shipment and just two days later on a Friday...

I received another email saying it had shipped.  

And guess what?  By the next Tuesday (not even 5 days later), all of the books ordered from our eFair arrived at Van Meter. 

The boxes were packed perfectly and right on the top...

...were all of the packing slips.  

It was easy for us to get them out of the boxes and organize them on a couple of book carts for delivery. 

We also received an email with a detailed lists of each order and the books that went with the orders. 

My library associate, Diana, printed it off and cut them apart.  

This helped Diana as she pulled the books together for each individual order.  She placed the slip right inside of the book cover. 

It was easy for us to lay out the orders if we had certain classes in the library to pick them up and...

...and when Diana went around to deliver them to the students in their classrooms too. 

They were very excited to see her, 

especially when they realized they had received the books they had on their eFair Wish List.  

She was extra careful to hold the special gift purchases in the library for pickup. 

Again, Follett made it easy for us to print these off and...

..place them with the books in that order.  

We printed stickers from the eFair resources so students and families could write a little gift label to place inside of the book. 

We also made sure that ALL students received another eFair bookmark so everyone felt like they received something from the library in the deliveries. 

Another exciting thing that happened as our eFair closed was I received an email with the great news we had earned over $800.  

When I logged into the Follett Book eFair site, I saw this under Shop Your Rewards too. 

That week, Follett announced that we could shop from the...

...Follett Book eFairs site or...

...with Follett Titlewave Rewards.  

I am very thankful and excited for that.  Since I do the majority of our collection development and purchasing through Follett, this was going to make it so much more beneficial and timely for our school library collection. 

Our kids at Van Meter, at school and learning virtually, loved our Follett Book eFair.  And the best part, it put amazing new books into their hands and into our library, classrooms and homes. 

You can learn more about eFairs in the Follett webinar, Engage Your Entire School With An eFair, that I did last week as part of the double feature webinar, The Virtual Librarian. 

Here is a blog post with the recording and also..

...the Virtual Librarian Collection by Destiny, which contains lots of the eFair resources and ideas I shared in the webinar and these two posts too. 

You can learn more about Follett Book eFairs here on their site. 

We can't wait to have another starting right after Thanksgiving, so we can offer this opportunity and fun right before the holidays.  I hope that you bring one to your students and community this year too.