Best practices for implementing and promoting tandems at your library

Beanstack makes it easy for library partners to link their Beanstack site up with their local school's Beanstack site via a tandem connection. Tandems allow your patrons to sync up their school and library profiles so that all their logged reading counts toward both sites' challenges, badges, and logs. And they allow you as a library administrator to promote challenges more broadly, see more reading data from your patrons, grow participation and engagement levels at the library, and seamlessly partner with your local schools.

To maximize your tandem partnership, here are some best practices to keep in mind for your library’s Beanstack site, challenges, and promotions.

1. 1. Be open to editing your site’s registration settings and log types.
      With a tandem connection, school readers from multiple different schools can pick from among multiple different libraries to start a tandem link, and they can either link to an existing account and profile or create a new one. Because of this, there are a few requirements and recommendations for creating a successful tandem connection for your library site.
      
      
      1. School must be a displayed registration field on your site, and ideally a required one. Requiring school selections for all readers means that more readers will see the option to link their profiles! This setting is available to edit within Setup > Registration Fields.
      2. The school names in your site’s school registration options must match the schools’ rostering service(s). Editing school names will also update the reader information for profiles who already selected those schools, so you won’t lose any data. These names are set up within Setup > Registration Fields > Schools.
      3. Schools’ rostering services may collect different personal information than your site’s registration settings, so students who create a library account directly through their school site during the tandem linking process may bypass some required registration information when setting up their account. The bypassed registration fields often include library card, branch, local area, partner, phone number, and zip code. If you need this registration information for reporting purposes, consider scheduling a weekly School Tandem Connected Reader report or Individual Account Creator Registration report so that you can contact newly created accounts to update that information.
      4. On your site, you can choose to activate the log types that work best for your community within Challenges > Log Types, but keep in mind that only school reading sessions that use your active log types will transfer over to your site once readers are linked. You may want to work with your school counterparts to make sure your log types are aligned with theirs, so that you can see all of the linked readers’ logged reading!
         
         
   2. Promote the ability to link profiles to patrons and parents.
      Once your tandem connection is live, make sure your community knows how to link their profiles—and know the benefits of doing so!
      
      
      1. Post our library flyer at your computer center and at circulation or youth services desks, especially during busy challenge seasons like summer and winter. Consider sending out a tweet, Facebook post, or newsletter blurb with the flyer information too, so that readers at home know how to link their profiles too.
      2. Talk up the ability to link profiles and count reading toward two profiles, challenges, and logs at events for school-aged community members, in challenge descriptions or activity badges, and through other library programming.
         
         
   3. Work together with your school partners.
      Teamwork can help you, your school counterparts, and your readers fully maximize the tandem connection.
      
      
      1. Set up seasonal touch points with your school partners to communicate about upcoming challenges and programming plans. These could be as simple as an ongoing email chain or as hands-on as a quarterly meet-up!
      2. Collaborate and support your tandem partners by hyping their content and challenges, especially during their “primetime.” That could mean a special incentive or social media shoutout to linked readers during back to school and other busy times. And you can make it easy for your school partners to spread the word about library programming during your busy seasons of summer and winter by sending them suggested social images or newsletter blurbs to share out to students and families.
         
   4. Check linked profiles and data periodically.
      You can keep tabs on tandems through reports!
      
      
      1. Run or schedule the School Tandem Connected Reader report to get a list of all the readers who have linked up with their school profiles.
      2. Periodically check the Potential Duplicate Account Creators report. Since students have the option to create a new library account and profile when linking their profiles, they can sometimes get confused and create a new account when they should link to an existing family account. If you schedule or run this report often, you can catch any accidental duplicates early and fix the problem by transferring bulk-reading to the original account, deleting the duplicate, and helping the student link to the correct account and profile.