Promoting a Free Educational App — Book Jar — for Parents of K-12 Children
By: Kabir, Ko-Bir
Tags: Apps, Hometech

We officially launched the free Book Jar app on the Apple Appstore and Google Play Store two weeks ago. It is meant for parents of kids in K-12 schools where children are encouraged to read books on their own by setting Accelerated Reader (AR) goals. The Accelerated Reader (AR) program is a commercial program that many schools purchase from a company.

It allows the schools to evaluate student reading comprehension using computerized quizzes. For example, if a student reads a book and takes the comprehension quiz for that book in the school, they can earn AR points. Each student sets their own AR goal per trimester, and if they achieve their goals, they often get rewarded by the teacher or their parents.

As a parent of two elementary school-going boys, I wanted to make it easy for me to choose the right books for them and track their AR goal progress. So I made a simple app for the parents who care about this specific niche area of their children’s education.

However, launching a free app for parents is one thing, and getting it in front of them is a different matter. I don’t want to “push” it in front of them too much. More importantly, there is not an advertising budget for this in my company. We already contributed all the engineering time and resources to build this and offer it as a free app. You can see more details about the app at:

https://bookjar.app

My initial plan to promote this app is as follows:

Word of mouth — I am going to meet anywhere from 10–20 parents in this school year and a few of them might be interested in Book Jar.

— I am going to meet anywhere from 10–20 parents in this school year and a few of them might be interested in Book Jar. Medium.com Posts — this very post is one of the attempts to talk about Book Jar, and I plan to write a few more posts about it from time to time.

— this very post is one of the attempts to talk about Book Jar, and I plan to write a few more posts about it from time to time. I nstagram Post and advertising — lots of parents and teachers are on Instagram. So, I could post to target this very niche audience who want to help their kids with AR reading goals.

— lots of parents and teachers are on Instagram. So, I could post to target this very niche audience who want to help their kids with AR reading goals. Reach out to online parents and teachers resources — this might be hard as sending an email or Facebook/Instagram messages to strangers are often undesirable by the recipients.

— this might be hard as sending an email or Facebook/Instagram messages to strangers are often undesirable by the recipients. Reach out to relevant YouTubers — this might also be difficult but needs to be explored.

Since school just started for my kids, I haven’t been speaking to parents yet. Soon we will have events, birthdays and play-dates, the usual school social activities. I will share the Book Jar app personally with some parents who might be interested.

Since my kids go to an outstanding public school, there is a good chance that I can speak to the Principal and other teachers about Book Jar. Perhaps, I can make a PDF flyer that they can share with parents. It will be a great way to introduce the app to their school. If this works, I can reach out to a few other schools through email and visits.

The medium.com posts are straightforward to write and publish, like this one. I will research some details on the pros and cons of the Accelerated Reading (AR) program and post a few relevant articles.

Finally, the Instagram post and a tiny advertising campaign seem very interesting to explore. So, I did a small campaign spending $100 for seven days. Here are some interesting insights that I learned from this tiny campaign.

I created a quick-and-dirty Instagram post using the online Canva software, as shown below: