readMedia allows you to easily and rapidly publish hundreds or even thousands of personalized achievements about your students on the web, in social networks and in traditional media -- the kind of stories your students will want to engage with online and share with their family and friends.

How Does it Work? | Spreadsheets | Templates | Sending an Achievement | Measuring Your Success


How does it work?
readMedia's platform does three things, all with one click:

• First, it publishes a personalized achievement for every student on the web at readabout.me (learn more here).
  
• Second, it emails a link to the personalized achievement to the student and their parents'.
• Third, it sends each student's hometown newspaper a press release about their accomplishment.
  

readMedia is web-based, so there's no software to download. You can login from anywhere with an internet connection.

To send an achievement, you will need to create a spreadsheet with your student's personalized information and a story template. In the end, readMedia will match up your template with your spreadsheet to generate personalized stories for each student in your spreadsheet.

Spreadsheet
Your spreadsheet can be obtained as a report from your registrar. Your spreadsheet will contain the details about your students that will personalize your achievements. You can include as much information as you would like, but every spreadsheet must include:

• a column of zip codes labeled postal_code
• a column for email addresses
  
• separate columns for the students first name, last name and hometown.

Template
Your template is a generic story that contains blank spaces in it called placeholders. Your placeholders in your template will be filled in with information from your spreadsheet when it comes time to send your achievement. You can get as creative as you would like and insert endless placeholders.

Your template will be two versions of the same story built into one. A version called the "Single Format" is what students will share on Facebook, and a version called the "Multiple Format" acts as a press release for newspapers.

Here's a single and multiple version story about students being inducted into an honor society. You can see that there are placeholders for where customized information should be, like the student's name, hometown and school year.




Sending an achievement
Once you have your template and spreadsheet uploaded into the platform, you're ready to merge the two together.

You use drop-down menus to tell readMedia which columns from your spreadsheet should be matched to that placeholder. It will pull the first row of data from your spreadsheet so you can spot-check yourself.

After you send your achievement, you'll be able to access a delivery report. It summarizes the achievements you've published, and the geographic areas you're reaching.

You can even see social media stats, like how many times an individual student's achievement was shared to sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Measuring your success
Not only does readMedia show stats in the delivery report for each achievement you send, it also show aggregate stats on your dashboard when you login.

Web Stats show you how many individual stories you've published over time, the geographic reach of the different media you've sent these stories to, and how popular students' stories are online. You can even see where traffic to online stories is coming from, and how often stories were posted to a social media sites like Facebook.

Most schools incorporate these web stats into their monthly reports.