Who are we?

Under New Management

Stop press!

The Choose a Challenge events service will be relaunching under new management in October 2011.

Stay tuned for more details, or contact us to prepare for your event now.

Ceasing Trading

We regret to announce that Choose a Challenge will be ceasing trading as of 12th June 2011. To reflect this change, we are no longer accepting new applications for charity partners, bookings or events with immediate effect. Unless you have been contacted to indicate otherwise, any existing bookings will be honoured and managed as per the Challenge & Payment Terms available here.

Choose a Challenge would like to thank all of its customers, charity partners and clients, now numbering in the tens of thousands, who have loyally supported us since our formation. We have thoroughly enjoyed working with you all, and extend our sincere apologies for any inconvenience posed by this change of situation.

We'd like to wish you all the best of luck with your fundraising and charitable endeavours.

For the very last time - Blue Skies,

The Choose a Challenge Team

LCD Prague and Morocco Hitch

We're very happy to announce the extended relationship between Choose a Challenge and Link Community Development for their incredibly successful Prague and Morocco Hitch. Now in its 19th year, over 7,000 people have successfully hitched to either Prague or Morocco, raising over £3,000,000 in the process!

After our pilot scheme last year, our unique SMS Tracker system has been applied to manage 1,000 hitchers on this year's event. Starting tomorrow (12th March), anyone will be able to check in on their favourite team's progress from the LCD Hitch tracker page.

Drop us a line if you're in need of an SMS tracking system for your event :)

Various Updates

It's been a little while since our last update (it took some time to recover from Tough Guy...), but there's been plenty going on behind the scenes at Choose a Challenge.

Our automatic paperwork generation tool is one of the things we're most proud of. It allows us to speed up the processing of bookings and reduces the waiting around on the day - what's the point in electronic signup otherwise?

We've now integrated this tool into the Event Admin panel for event managers, removing all of the manual work from the process. Just turn up on the day and have your participants sign away. We've built templates for BPA Tandem Medical and BPA Student Membership forms, soon to be expanded to include location membership forms and everything else you could need.

Furthermore, we've extended the functionality in the Charity Admin panel to increase the data available in supporter downloads, and have implemented our notification system. This means that each day a booking is made to support your charity, the primary charity contact receives a summary of booking activity via email. No waiting around!

Request a Brochure

We're talking to charities full time at the moment, and have been getting some great feedback and new partners: right, left and centre.

We always send potential partners a copy of our glossy brochure, but if you're an environmentally friendly type (as we are) then you might prefer to receive an electronic version, and only print the bits you need.

For the first time, we've made our brochure fully available online. Just pick the topics you're interested in and off you go. You can also request information by mail, just stick your address in the form and we'll pop one in the post.

In scarier news, the Choose a Challenge team (Nick, James, James, Andy and I) are running Tough Guy this weekend. Wish us luck!

Give us a call

Bit of a late one tonight...

Due to increased call volumes, we've made some changes to the Choose a Challenge telephone system. Previously (with one main incoming line) callers were immediately directed to voicemail when the operator was busy - our shiny new PBX system directs you to the person you need straight away, only sending you to voicemail if absolutely necessary. There are some fancy “queues”, “parking lots” and “IVRs” (fun telecoms vocabulary) - all designed to increase efficiency and reduce waiting time.

This upgrade covers the full scope of the Smith Ellison companies, so there may be some teething problems whilst we make the final upgrades. We appreciate your patience in the meanwhile!

Our number remains unchanged - 020 3137 2851 - why not call us to find out what happens?

Happy New Year and VAT

Well the 4th of January is upon us, and as most of you well know VAT has just risen to the 20% rate. The highest ever in the UK, putting us on a par with much of Europe. Fuel prices, food and all the rest are going up.

The good news is: our prices aren't budging because of it. You still get the same old Choose a Challenge low rates, with our price guarantee. We're still the cheapest in the UK and loving it.

Video Editor Wanted

Our challenges are pretty cool, there's no denying that, but sometimes photos just aren't enough to get across exactly how much fun they really are.

So we're looking for someone with strong video editing skills (e.g. Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro/After Effects etc.) to work their magic on some of the footage that we have and to turn it in to something special. So if you fit the bill and you fancy earning some extra cash in the run up to Christmas (and beyond) then get in touch!

Update - 14th December - thanks for all the responses, we're now reviewing and making some difficult decisions! Some truly excellent candidates.

Support Section launched

I'm very happy to announce that we've launched our long awaited Support section of the website, which includes guidance on all manner of practical and website guidance.

Links around the website should now be directing you to relevant help articles and topics, and event pages should be loading in filtered content to their FAQ pages. There's a search function, and a library of "tags" to help you find and view associated information.

No doubt we'll be adding more and more technical content as we go on...

We're going to do our utmost to ensure this content is kept up to date, so that you can always be sure that what you're reading is relevant. Looking forward to hearing all the feedback!

Updated Privacy Policy

We've just updated our privacy policy, to take into account some of our most recent developments. All registered members of the site will be informed of this change when they next access their accounts.

To summarise the important bits:

• We'll now be sharing event and challenge participants contact details with their chosen charities by default. The goal is to improve the support of fundraisers from their beneficiary causes, in line with our improved Charity Admin panel.

• Charity administrators will also be able to access the phone numbers and addresses of their fundraisers. This access is controlled by the Choose a Challenge Information Security Policy.

• The policy also benefits from changes relating to Facebook access. Access to Facebook account data is strictly controlled by Facebook and by users' application privacy settings.

Click here to read the Privacy Policy, or here to download a PDF copy. If you've got any questions, don't hesitate to get in touch.

One Year On

How time flies! Somehow during the busy season, it becomes almost impossible to take a step back and actually write up all the developments! Needless to say, I'm now doing my best to make amends.

Perhaps the most obvious change has been the introduction of our long awaited new website - we're already feeling the benefits of this mammoth bit of work, and hope that our users are too! It seems as though we've achieved what we wanted - amalgamating the best of our existing technology and with a fresh new style. We've already heard some great feedback, but if you'd like to make your view heard then please do contact us. In the month that has passed since the migration, we've slowly enabled more features and will continue to do so over the coming weeks.

We've had many requests to offer our challenges on an individual basis as well - allowing anyone to find a charity and challenge suited to them, outside of the events model. Well, we've finally succumbed to the pressure and are delighted to announce our new individual challenge booking service, in association with some of the biggest UK charities and best challenge providers. To find and book your challenge, try our Challenge Finder to quickly find challenges and dates all over the country.

The summer was a perfect opportunity for us to research and do some new challenges - the first of these (Bungee Jumping and Shark Diving) are now available for both individual bookings and events, so do check out our Challenges section to find out more.

As expected, our university busy season is in full swing, with some great new events already sold out or seriously beating previous sign up rates. A special mention has to go to Warwick Jailbreak for their 345 participants - a UK record!

It's now been one year since our launch, and we've never been happier about Choose a Challenge's progress and the fundraising successes - well done to everyone who helped break the £200,000 mark! See you at £1mil...