Running a Reading Plan

A reading plan gives your library a shared reading experience: one book everyone reads together, a reading track, or a group challenge. You set it up once — the app publishes each week, notifies participants, and wraps everything up when it ends. You need to be a library owner, admin, or facilitator to create plans. Facilitators manage the plans they create; admins can manage every plan and are the only ones who can feature a plan or announce it to all members.

Creating a Plan

Owners and admins: on a computer, open Reading plans in the admin sidebar. On a phone, open Admin → Dashboard and tap Reading plans under Go to, or All plans on the Reading plans row. Then tap New plan. When your libraries don’t have a plan to join yet, the Reading plans page shows Create a plan too (pick the library if you run more than one).

Facilitators don’t use the admin area — see Facilitating a Reading Plan for how to open your plan list.

The flow walks you through these steps (book studies skip the template picker):

Intent — pick the shape: Book study (one book, weekly rhythm), Pathway (an ordered track members work through at their own pace), or Challenge (read a number of books in a window).

A book study is short: the book, when you meet, and the weeks. The steps below marked (pathway and challenge) don’t appear for one.

Template (pathway and challenge) — start from a ready-made template for your library type (it pre-fills the title, schedule, and discussion prompts — everything stays editable) or start from scratch. This is also where you name the plan and can turn discussions off (they’re off by default for school libraries).
Books — search your library’s inventory first, with a toggle to search the full catalog for books you don’t own yet. Pathways can add a one-line note to each book. A book study takes its name from the book, so there’s nothing to title.
When — for a book study, the start date and how many weeks (six by default), plus the day and time you meet and where. Everything here is a word in the line your group reads on day one: Six Thursdays at 7:00 pm. Pathways and challenges set a start and end date instead. Weekly milestones are generated from the window; changing it regenerates the schedule (with a confirmation if you’ve already written prompts).

The address is visible to the people in the study and to nobody else.
Weeks — each week gets a reading focus (“Chapters 4–6”) and an optional discussion question. Write them now or leave weeks quiet — a week with no content goes out silently, with no notification. Anything you write here is visible to your group straight away, including for weeks still to come. Each week can also say it’s meeting somewhere else just this once.

For a book study this is the last step: the footer starts the study.
Preview (pathway and challenge) — see exactly what members will see.
Launch (pathway and challenge) — makes the plan visible and joinable in your library. Launching itself is quiet: members can find the plan on the library page (and it appears in the community activity feed), but nobody is notified until you choose to spread the word — see the next section. If the start date is in the future, members can join right away and the schedule begins on time.

Your work saves as a draft automatically, so you can build a plan over several sittings — nothing is visible to members until you launch.

Spreading the Word

Right after launch (and anytime later from Share this plan — on a book study that’s the overflow menu on the study itself; on a pathway or challenge it’s on the manage page), you choose how to tell people:

Invite members — pick people by name and each gets a personal invitation. An invitation lets them in: they don’t have to ask, and you don’t have to accept them again. Members already in the plan (or invited in the last week) are skipped automatically. Invites still work after you turn off Open to new members.
Share link — copy a link that opens right on the plan, with a proper preview card when pasted into group chats, emails, or the church bulletin.
Announce to members (pathway and challenge) — a one-time announcement to every library member: a push notification first, with an email for anyone it can’t reach. You can send this once per plan. Book studies don’t announce to the whole library.
Inviting someone not in the library yet? — copy a join link that adds them to the library first, then takes them straight to the plan. Admins only.

What Runs Itself

After launch, the plan is on autopilot:

Each milestone publishes on its date, and participants get a weekly notification — only when the week actually has content.
Members’ progress tracks automatically from their normal reading activity. Finishing early or joining late both just work.
Joined members get a reminder the day before the start (skipped when your announcement went out that same day — nobody gets pinged twice).
At the end date, the plan shows a wrap-up summary for a week, then archives itself.

Your only recurring job is optional: glance at the plan, and write or polish next week’s question. Tap any week to edit it — a week your group already has keeps its date, but what it says stays editable, so you can still fix a typo in the question they’re discussing.

Your group can read ahead. Questions you’ve written for later weeks are visible to members as soon as you write them — they just can’t post a reflection into a week that hasn’t arrived yet. If you’d rather work on a question in private, leave it blank until you’re happy with it.

Who’s in a Book Study

A book study is by invitation or request: someone taps Ask to join and you decide. Open the study and tap the row of faces to see everyone, with anyone waiting at the top — Accept is one tap, and Decline lets you add a short note that only that person sees. Declining isn’t a door: they can ask again whenever they like, and you won’t be pestered about it — a second ask within a week of a decline doesn’t notify you.

People you’ve invited appear there too, marked Invited, but there’s no Accept beside them: an invitation is yours to offer and theirs to take up, so they join by tapping Accept invitation on the study themselves. If you’d rather they didn’t after all, Withdraw takes the invitation back — and you can invite them again later.

The same panel has a switch labelled Open to new members. Turn it off and the group carries on reading; the study just stops appearing in your library and stops taking requests. You can still invite people by name. Turn it back on whenever you like.

You manage a book study from the study itself — there’s no separate admin screen for one.

Reading the Pulse

(Pathways and challenges. A book study is one page, so there’s no pulse to open.)

Open a plan from Reading plans to see its pulse, one line under the title: how many joined, how many are reading, how many finished, and how many reflections were posted this week — a ten-second answer to “is anyone still with us?” Reading counts anyone who made progress on one of the plan’s books or posted a reflection in the last 7 days. Below the pulse, tabs show the schedule editor, the roster (not started / reading / finished), and a copy-availability roll-up for the plan’s books.

Moderating Reflections

Members can report a reflection they find inappropriate. Reports arrive in your admin dashboard, where you can review the reflection and remove it if needed — the same flow you use for book reviews. You can also remove any reflection directly from the plan page. Facilitators can remove reflections in the plans they run; the report queue itself stays with admins.

Reusing, Archiving, and Deleting

From the plan’s menu (⋯):

Duplicate copies the books, notes, schedule, and prompts into a new draft with shifted dates — running last year’s plan again takes one click.
Archive closes the plan early with the same wrap-up members see at a normal ending. Archived plans stay readable for everyone.
Delete is only available while the plan has no participants; once people have joined, archive instead.

Plan Limits

Every library can run one launched plan at a time on the free tier; Growth and above run unlimited simultaneous plans. Drafts and archived plans never count against the limit, and members always participate for free. See Subscription plans and limits.

Using reading plans — the member experience
Managing library members

Still Need Help?

If you have questions about running a reading plan, contact support.