Directors' Blog

We've managed to squeeze in the opportunity for a mail-out and blog post, despite some of our busiest work schedules to date. Firstly, we hope you're all enjoying the excellent weather, and making the most of its opportunities for fundraising, challenges and sun lounging.

It's been some time since our last update - we decided to change the format of these mail-outs to a quarterly basis, hence the three month gap between postings. Assuming we plan effectively, we can still send out the most important news and notices out in these windows, but if you're keen not to miss out on anything then do subscribe to our Twitter feed @choosechallenge. We do plan to keep the blog updated on a more regular basis from now on, and the mailing list will summarise these posts and elaborate where necessary.

Firstly, we've just celebrated our first birthday! Whilst Choose a Challenge first started operating in October '09, as far as we, the accountants and HMRC are concerned, Smith Ellison Ltd started on 15th June 2009. It's been a great experience: we've learnt a lot, achieved all that we set out to in this period and are eagerly looking forward to Year 2.

Many of you may have noticed some substantial changes in the Choose a Challenge website over the last few months. We've completely rebuilt the challenge sign up, checkout and shopping basket, challenge page structure, challenge admin system, members' home page, information security policy, SMS tracker, donation tracking and a whole host of minor changes. Whilst downtime was kept to an absolute minimum during this period, we really appreciate your patience during this process. Website development is likely to continue at a similar rate over the summer, but will be less obvious to the casual observer than before.

On the topic of fundraising, we're edging ever closer to the £200,000 raised for charity mark. We've had some really successful events, including The Great Warwick Jump, The Great Trent Jump and DUCK Jailbreak. Well done to all our fundraisers, in particular Christian Foss (http://www.justgiving.com/christian-foss) who raised £1,960.10 as part of Bristol Jailbreak - our highest fundraiser yet!

April and May were busy months for our "Jump" charity skydiving events - Rob in particular worked round the clock for five weeks to make these an unparalleled success. We shared some great weather and sunburn with students from Warwick, Cambridge and Nottingham Trent amongst many others. Thanks go to all the skydiving centres we partner with for the smooth running of the actual skydiving.

As many of our clients are universities, we planned early to fill the summer months with other activities, so we've been enthusiastically pursuing the corporate sector, currently trialling corporate skydiving events with Deloitte, BT and HSBC GCC - some great names that we're proud to work with. A major endeavour for us this summer is our first event open to the general public - The Great Escape in collaboration with The Firefighters Charity. This takes our classic Jailbreak event model, but gives it the nationwide infrastructure of the firefighters seven regional departure points, plenty of press and publicity and a great charity to raise for. Signup for this challenge is open here, so if you've not done a Jailbreak yet then now's your chance.

Finally, we're all about customising our systems for our clients - and you can see our recent work with Durham University for 3 Peaks and 5 Peaks events as well as Warwick Jailbreak's Escaped event in action. A major piece of work for us was providing our SMS tracking service to the famous LCD Prague Hitch, which required a standalone build of our systems. Please do contact us if any of our advertised services can be tailored to you.

So - lots of news, but it's great to be back in dialogue with you all and keep track of the blog for more regular posts from now on.

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We're sat here scratching our heads in wonder at just where the time has gone, as it seems that it's already March and we're well and truly into our "event season". That being the case, we're putting the finishing touches to The Great Warwick Jump, The Great Cambridge Jump, The Great York Jump, The Great Leicester RAG Jump, Oxford Lost, Bolton Jailbreak and Bristol Jailbreak all of which are happening next weekend.

Phew! It's certainly going to be a busy one!

The eagle eyed amongst you will have already noticed that our good old "Terms and Conditions" have undergone a bit of a rewrite. We've been having lots of chats with some nice lawyers, who have put together our shiny new documentation, namely:

• the General Terms Of Website Use;
• the Privacy Policy;
• the Registered User Terms And Conditions;
• our Challenge Terms And Conditions; and
• a Payment Policy.

You can read all of them here. Whilst they may not be page-turners in the traditional sense, they're important for us and our customers to set out the way we work together, so please do read and review these.

This month's most exciting update - we have blitzed past the £100,000 raised for charity mark and the total just keeps going. You can see the progress over the last month in the graph below:

Look for where we bulk added lots of fundraising accounts a few days ago. See you at the £1,000,000 mark!

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As promised we're back with a few updates as to what we've been doing over the last month. You may have noticed some cosmetic changes happening in various places - these are all in line with our planned relaunch of a number of our old features and the unveiling of several new ones. This is set to occurr over the next month and we look forward to your feedback as and when these changes become apparent.

Our proudest achievement this month has been the completion of making all of our hosted activities and events carbon neutral. We're very grateful to the people at Clear for all their assistance and advice in this lengthy process. For more information on Choose a Challenge and the environment, you can read up on our policy here.

In the wider charity events world, we'd like to draw your attentions to a great event being run by our friend Will at Right to Play. The Brussels to London Bike Ride is a great way to raise money for a wonderful cause and get fit at the same time. To read more about the event click here.

We've also taken the opportunity to launch some Jailbreak spinoffs - namely Lost and Runaway. These new categories mean that we've now reached fourteen universities and have also stormed past the twenty charity events mark - not bad for our first four months!

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