Blog Post

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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