Since 2022, the Wisconsin Schools Digital Library Consortium (WSDLC) has hosted the Reach More Readers Challenge, a friendly competition between WSDLC-member school districts with the goal of (re)introducing students to the digital materials available to them year-round, encouraging and empowering them to continue reading all summer long.
This competition is simple: Library staff at WSDLC member schools use the month of May to engage students with OverDrive’s Sora reading app by challenging them to check out more titles than in March. Using months with an equal amount of days allows the WSDLC Project Managers and OverDrive team to compare student usage month over month most accurately. The schools that see the largest percentage checkout increase are declared the winners! Along with bragging rights, winning schools have also received prizes thanks to OverDrive’s support such as Sora-themed stickers, bookmarks, luggage tags, sweatshirts, and even content credit to purchase additional digital titles for their own local collections.
2025’s Reach More Readers Challenge wrapped up at the end of May, and the top school, Whitnall School District’s High School, saw a whopping 16,800% increase in students accessing the collections! That is, they went from just a handful of their students utilizing this resource in March, to nearly 10% of their enrolled students checking out titles in May. The runners-up followed closely behind, with the next 3 schools – Winkler Elementary of Burlington School District, Cochrane-Fountain City High School, Sheridan Elementary of Sheboygan Area School District – seeing increases ranging from 10,800% to 12,900%.
On average, WSDLC member schools saw an increase in student-usage of 143%, with an astounding total of 51,267 individual students checking out at least one digital title via the Sora reading app, the highest from any month since the WSDLC began in 2018! And for 5,019 of those students, it was their first time reading in Sora.
Each year, the number of students checking out titles over the summer continues to grow, and even though this summer has just begun, student usage in 2025 has seen a 27% increase over last summer. Not only that, but the percentage of students reading throughout the year has continued to build each year as well. The Reach More Readers Challenge truly lives up to its name by engaging students with the WSDLC collections ahead of summer, as well as encouraging students to keep coming back to the digital collections throughout the school year and beyond.
