School Radar and Library Radar: what they find, why they're US-only, and what the harvest sweep really does

You saw the radars announced, you went looking for them, and now you have a question the app does not answer anywhere on screen. Two versions of it arrive constantly. The first comes from performers outside the United States: Is there any current or future support for Canada (re: library search, dances/school search). The second comes from performers who already turned Autopilot on and assumed the pieces connect: the radars feel like a natural extension of the harvest sweep, and when those types of automatic sweeps are performed they should gather the type of data these radars promise. Both are fair readings of the product. One is half right and one is wrong, and this article is straight about which is which.

The harvest sweep does prospect, but it does not run the radars

The instinct here is half right, so start with the half that is correct. The weekly harvest is a genuine outward run. It is listed on the upgrade page as the weekly venue harvest, and that is what it does: it builds a venue list in the browser, drafts personalised outreach into your outreach queue, and does the week's target research and post drafts. It is research and drafts only. Nothing is sent or posted on your behalf. By default it runs on a Friday morning, and you set the time yourself when Otto sets up the Autopilot schedule.

What the harvest run does not do is run either radar. It does not touch the bundled library dataset or the bundled schools dataset, so it never produces the ranked county list with fee bands that a radar gives you. It hunts venues, not libraries and not school dances.

So the outward, data-gathering work is spread across three separate things, not one:

1. The weekly harvest, which builds a venue list and drafts outreach on the Autopilot schedule.
2. The lead engine, which finds and enriches good local leads that match your act. That is the one you set up with Set up my lead engine in the Get set up group on the Plays tab.
3. The radars, meaning School Radar and Library Radar. These are on-command plays you start yourself, not scheduled runs.

Being straight about the current limit: a scheduled sweep cannot pull radar data automatically today. You run a radar when you decide to run it. The request to have the scheduled sweeps do it for you has been logged as legitimate feedback, it is not built, and no date is promised for it.

Where the radars live and what each one returns

Both radars sit in the Get set up group, the first group on the Plays tab, alongside the other one-tap setups. Each is a row with a Do it for me button. Both are part of the Otto tier, so on a Pearl account the row shows Upgrade to schedule instead, which opens the upgrade page in your browser.

Both start the same way: Otto asks which US county to work, as a two-letter state code plus a county name, for example NJ and Bergen. He saves your answer, so a resumed run cannot ask you the same question twice. Neither dataset names the person who books, so in both cases the ranked list is step one and a live web search for the right human is step two. Every outreach note lands as a draft for you to approve. Nobody is ever contacted automatically.

Library Radar

The row is labelled Run Library Radar. It reads the bundled IMLS public-libraries survey and returns every public library in the county you named, ranked by how much children's programming that library system actually runs, each with a market-rate fee band. The dataset side is deterministic and offline, so that part costs you nothing in tokens. Fee bands are priced per kids and family show, typically 30 to 45 minutes. The verified benchmarks behind them cluster single shows around 300 to 500 dollars, with multi-show blocks and summer-reading budgets going higher. Treat a band as a starting point, not a quote.

Otto then researches the strongest prospects live: the youth-services or programming coordinator, whether that branch books paid performers at all, and their booking form or email. Then he drafts the outreach for your approval.

One thing to know if your app looks different from this article: the DJ & AV edition does not show Library Radar at all, because a library children's programming budget has no DJ or AV equivalent. School Radar is there in every edition.

School Radar

The row is labelled Run School Radar. It reads the bundled NCES schools directory and ranks the dance-buying schools in your county: high schools first for proms, homecomings and formals, then middle schools for mixers. Elementary schools are left out on purpose. Each school comes back with a per-dance fee band, priced for a typical three to four hour dance, plus this year's theme intel. The season calendar it works to is worth knowing on its own: homecoming season runs August to October, prom season books November to March for dances in April to June, and middle-school mixers run all year.

The bundled school list is a seed extract rather than a complete national file. If your county comes back thin or empty, Otto builds the list with a live web search instead, applying the same ranking rules and the same price bands. After that he searches live for who actually runs the dance, which is usually the student activities director, a class advisor, or the PTA, plus this year's dance date and the booking contact, and prepares a draft for each strong school.

Both radars are US-only, and no setting will change that

If you are reading this thinking I'm in Canada, here is the honest answer before you spend an evening on it. School Radar and Library Radar are built for US markets. Under the hood they read bundled US datasets: the IMLS public-libraries survey for libraries, and the NCES schools directory for schools. Both datasets are organised by US state and county, and the tools that read them expect a two-letter US state code.

Point either radar at a Canadian region, or any other non-US region, and you get no ranked list and no fee bands. There is nothing wrong with your install. Almost everyone tries the same thing first, which is to go hunting through Settings for a country or a region picker that will unlock the rest of the world. There is no such picker, and adding one would not help, because the data for your region is not in the app to be unlocked. Skip that step.

What actually works outside the US today

Otto has web browsing built in, so instead of the one-tap radar you ask him in plain language and he does the research live. Copy one of these into the chat box and replace the bracketed part with your city or region.

• Schools: Find the high schools and middle schools near [city/region] that run proms, formals and mixers, tell me who books the entertainment, and draft outreach for each.
• Libraries: Find the public libraries near [city/region] that run youth programming, tell me who books performers, and draft outreach for each.

He researches on the open web and prepares the outreach as drafts for your approval, exactly as the US radars do at their final step. It is more hands-on than a one-tap scan, and it will not hand you the bundled ranking or the fee bands, but it works today and it needs no setup beyond web browsing being switched on.

Before you try it, confirm that browsing is actually on for your install. The article Web browsing and Browser control: what Otto can and cannot do explains where the switch lives and what he is allowed to do once it is on, Let Otto browse the web with Chrome or Safari walks the setup, and Why Otto says browser control is not available covers the case where he tells you he cannot browse at all.

The roadmap answer, without softening it

Canadian radar data, and non-US radar data generally, is not in the build today and it is not on a committed roadmap. No date is promised. The request is logged, and it moves up the list as more non-US performers ask for it. If that is you, submit a ticket saying so, because the count is what moves it.

Milestone Radar is a different animal

Milestone Radar carries the word radar and gets folded in with the other two, and it should not be. It does not read the bundled US library or school datasets at all. It is a one-time occasion scan that runs on your own connected Apollo key, searching the market you set for companies with a money-dated anniversary coming up, and it uses your Hunter key for contact discovery when you have stored one. So if a radar of yours is asking for a market and an Apollo connection rather than a state and a county, you are in Milestone Radar, and nothing on this page about counties or fee bands applies to it.

If it still does not work

If you are in a US county and a radar still comes back empty, tell us the exact state and county you gave it. For School Radar a thin county is expected behaviour and Otto should fall back to a live web search, so if he does not, that is worth reporting. If you are outside the US, the plain-language browsing prompts above are the supported path today, and a ticket from you is what raises the priority of bundling data for your country.

Still stuck? Submit a ticket from this help center and we'll take it from there.