For campus store teams, rush is one of the biggest challenges you face. Use these five tips to prepare for a smoother term:
1. Start rush prep early. Load your catalog, verify course schedules, and confirm campus contacts 8 to 10 weeks before the term starts.
2. Walk the student journey. Look for common access issues ahead of time, like students skipping the Bookshelf® account setup.
3. Set faculty up for success. Send adoption communications early and keep workflows easy to follow.
4. Close faculty awareness gaps. Host faculty events so instructors know which tools are already part of their course materials.
5. Check your reports year-round. Review the opt-out report, the Student Participation and Materials report, and the pending purchase order view in Connect regularly, not just at billing time.
Fall rush is behind you, and now is the best time to get ready for the next one. Rush is one of the busiest stretches of the year for campus stores, and our teams have spent years helping store teams move through it with fewer surprises. Here are a few tips to help
your next term run smoothly. If you want to go deeper, the Learn Summit session recordings are another great place to keep learning.
The stores that move through rush smoothly every term have one thing in common: they get ahead of it. With fall rush behind you, now is a good time to think about spring. Loading your catalog, verifying course schedules, confirming your campus contacts, and knowing who to call when something goes wrong: all of that should happen around 8-10 weeks out. A little prep goes a long way toward making rush feel manageable rather than overwhelming.
The Rush Readiness Timeline below breaks down every milestone from catalog creation all the way through census and billing. Save it, share it with your team, and use it as your planning guide for each term.
Taking the time to experience what your students go through, from that first welcome email to opening their course materials, gives you a useful perspective. You start to see when questions might come up, where you can add a helpful touchpoint, and which things are already working well.
One thing that comes up more than you'd expect: students skipping the Bookshelf account setup when they first access their materials. It's the number one cause of access issues, and it's an easy fix once you know how to look for it. Knowing those small friction points before students hit them puts you in a much stronger position to help them quickly and confidently when rush arrives.
The way you set up and manage the adoption process can shape how faculty feel about digital materials right from the start. When communications go out early, workflows are easy to follow, and faculty have clear answers to their questions, they're a lot more likely to feel good about the program and stay engaged with it.
That's a win for everyone. Instructors who are confident in the process mean more students getting their materials, stronger participation, and a program that keeps growing year over year.
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) is a good example of this. Their Total Access program had 90% digital adoption and had saved students $30 million since 2016. Day One Access was fully integrated with Canvas. By almost any measure, everything was working. And yet instructors were still recommending ChatGPT to students, completely unaware that an institution-approved AI alternative was already included in their course materials.
The tools were there. The problem was that no one had made them visible to the people who needed to use them. That's exactly where you can make a difference.
When UTK hosted a faculty event to close that awareness gap, over 250 instructors registered and around 150 attended. It wasn't a vendor pitch. It was a conversation, led by their campus store with our team there to support. Faculty showed up because the store asked them, and that request carried weight precisely because of who asked.
Indian Hills Community College ran a campus-wide digital literacy initiative with the same approach and got the same result. What made it work was a trusted voice and a clear reason to get people in the room. If there are awareness gaps on your campus, a faculty event is a proven way to close them.
Program reports aren't just for end-of-term reconciliation. They're one of the best tools you have for understanding what's happening across your catalog, specifically who has access to what and why, and what students are doing with their materials once they have them.
The opt-out report, for example, can tell you exactly how many students opted out and from which sections, broken down by schedule or date range. That's useful information before billing comes into the picture. And it's not the only report worth checking regularly. The Student Participation and Materials report lets you track active licenses across one or multiple terms, see how students are engaging with different content types, and build the kind of data story that's worth sharing with campus administrators when you're making the case for your program.
On the billing side, before we generate your invoice, the pending purchase order view in Connect lets you review charges before they lock in, so there are no surprises when the official invoice arrives. Taken together, these reports give you visibility that goes far beyond billing season and into conversations about student access, overall health, and the future direction of the program.
You're not in this alone.
There's a whole network of people who get what you do. The VitalSource Community is a great place to connect with peers at other stores, swap ideas, and hear what's working for programs like yours. Close to 300 bookstore professionals are already members, including directors, managers, and store leaders from institutions across the country. The community generates nearly 150 interactions a month across posts, comments, and likes. Beyond the community, there's a dedicated team in your corner.
Not sure where to start? Just reach out to success@vitalsource.com, and we'll point you in the right direction.
Want to learn more? Catch all the VitalSource Learn recordings here.