Walk a mile in Quivalent's shoes!

We have a new title holder in the Biggest Sponsor stakes as of today - corporate sponsor www.quivalent.com
has upped the ante to a stupendous $250.00!

Quivalent's founders, Nick McNaughton and Yorke Hinds, both understand the value of a long, hard walk. Yorke completed national service in the South African army when recruits in advanced training were forced to march through hundreds of kilometers of desert with full packs and rifles until they dropped. This experience goes by the Afrikaans name of "Vasbyt", literally, "bite hard" (or, don't let go.) Nick meanwhile completed PNG's arduous Kokoda trail in 2005 - slightly shorter than Trailwalker at a mere 92km, but there's scarcely a flat section on the entire track, and the bits of it not knee-deep in mud are generally waist-deep in river water.

Quivalent also supports our Trailwalker team by providing us with their excellent Quivamail and Zookoda web platforms. Quivamail is an easy and flexible way to manage a professional-standard email marketing program (like the one that we use to email people and ask them for a donation.) Zookoda is a great way to send updates from your blog to subscribers via email, so they don't have to remember to return to your blog, or to bookmark your blog in their RSS feed reader (if you're reading this article because you received the first part of it via email, you're using Zookoda.) Zookoda's name, by the way, comes from Nick's experiences on the Kokoda trail!

I currently manage email delivery for four separate blogs via Zookoda, and have sent email campaigns to up to 10,000 email subscribers at a time using Quivamail, and I've found them to be by far the best solutions out there for this kind of thing. If you're looking at doing some email marketing, or want to keep your blog readers up-to-date, do yourself a favour and check them out.

- Alan