Despite a concerted effort to promote the competition, the Chestermere Public Library fell short of their goal for Read for 15 this year.
“We were initially delighted with the response that we got,” said Library Assistant Director Cathy Burness.
Chestermere more than doubled the per cent of the population that reported reading for at least 15 minutes on either Jan. 26 or 27 going from 1.36 per cent in 2017 to 3.57 per cent this year.
The Read for 15 competition encourages residents to read for at least 15 minutes on the competition date and then report their reading to the library to track the per cent of the population reading.
While Burness is happy with Chestermere’s improvement from last year it wasn’t enough to get ahead of the competition, some of which saw a 15 per cent increase over last year.
“And, in fact the Cardston Library was up 39.4 per cent,” she said.
Despite their efforts, Chestermere finished 23rd out of 33 competing communities.
In their efforts to spread the word to read, the library presented to city council, advertised on social media, and promoted the competition to local schools in an effort to increase this year’s participation.
“So, we we’re hopeful,” said Burness.
The one silver lining is that Chestermere beat Calgary for the second year in a row.
“Calgary got 0.41 per cent,” laughed Burness.
Despite the mixed results. Burness said that the Library is going to compete again next year.
“What that means is we have more work to do to get the word out there to make sure that people are aware of it,” she said.
One are she believes could lead to a lot of growth is in the classrooms.
While the library did speak to local schools to help promote the competition, many of them were closed on the Friday of Read for 15.
Because of this, Burness said they only had a couple of classes report their reading.
“We were really counting on the schools to jump on board this time,” she said.
And while she believes that schools helped to spread the word, it didn’t have as big an impact on reported reading as having a bunch of teachers report in that they whole class read.
“It’s not like we got dozens and dozens of classrooms teachers saying yes we read for 15 minutes, put us down for 60,” said Burness.
As the library looks at strategies to better promote the event next year, they have a solid core of keen readers to build from.
“They seemed very excited to be able to report their reading and the reading that perhaps three other members of their family read,” said Burness.
“I think people who were aware of it and got on board really liked the idea,” she said.
Some of the strategies they are thinking about include actual visits and presentations to the schools next year.
“When a child has a presenter at their school they’re inclined to go home and tell mom or dad that they have to do whatever the presenter said,” she said.
They are also considering speaking to more local clubs and organizations to promote the competition or to host a read-a-thon at the library.
“There’s some pretty creative things we could do,” said Burness.
“We’re not done we have more ideas,” she said.
