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 or admin to create plans.

Creating a Plan

Go to your library’s admin area, open Reading Plans, and tap Create Plan. The flow walks you through seven quick steps:

Intent — pick the shape: Together read (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).
Template — 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.
Dates — set the window. Weekly milestones are generated from these dates; changing them regenerates the schedule (with a confirmation if you’ve already written prompts).
Schedule — each week gets a reading focus (“Chapters 4–6”) and an optional discussion prompt. Write them now, insert one from the template’s prompt pack, or leave weeks quiet — a week with no content publishes silently, with no notification.
Preview — see exactly what members will see.
Launch — 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 the Spread the word button on the plan’s manage page), you choose how to tell people:

Announce to all members — 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.
Invite specific members — pick people by name and each gets a personal invitation. Members already in the plan (or invited in the last week) are skipped automatically.
Share a 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.
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.

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 prompt. Published weeks keep their content editable.

Reading the Pulse

Open a plan from Reading Plans to see its pulse: Joined, Active this week, Finished, and Reflections this week — a ten-second answer to “is anyone still with us?” 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.

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.