Going the Extra Mile for Good Causes

Hang up your trainers and fill the bath with ice because the Equal Experts Walkathon 2024 is done! Over the last 31 days, 1,779 of you in 185 teams have walked, jogged and treadmilled your way (yes, we know some of you have walking pads under your desks!) to a massive total of 475,000,000 steps, or 205,000 miles/330,000 kms, all in the name of charity (and of course, competition). 

You may have sworn off walking for the rest of the year, but it’s been a fascinating month of steps and stats, so here’s something to marvel at while you’re nursing your blisters and putting your feet up:

 


And that’s not all. For every 10,000 steps we took, Equal Experts will donate £2.20 to one of five charities, all customers either past or present.  That’s 1p for every 45 steps, which means your favourite cause stands to get a real boost to all the good work they do.

Together, our 475,000,000 steps mean we will donate a total of £108,000. Thank you for helping us do so much good!  The breakdown of this amount and charities are listed below:

  1. The Pret Foundation – £31,386
  2. Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) – £34,372
  3. Merlin’s Magic Wand – £12,157
  4. The Sea Life Trust (a Merlin charity) – £14,653
  5. The John Lewis Partnership Foundation – £15,432

A million footprints later…

We’re in awe of the 12 of you who walked over a million steps.  What an amazing feet (pun intended).  We are now officially consigning you all to the sofa until Christmas!  Here’s a list of all of the millionaire walkers, congratulations to every one of you:

The team who walks together…

Once again you made us laugh with clever team names and delighted us with your team spirit.  But there can only be one winner and that title goes yet again to Equal Experts very own Northern Soles – congratulations!  And congratulations to the other teams who made the top 10 as well:

As we say goodbye to the Equal Experts Walkathon 2024, we’d like to thank all of you for entering into the spirit so beautifully with us. We hereby give you leave to stand down, sit down and calm down – whether you’ve been dancing on the spot for a month (Steph Belton), putting steps before sips (Walk now wine later), or getting through on caffeine (Coffee Stomper). You did good – now rest! 

We say it every year, but every year it’s true. The Equal Experts Walkathon gets people moving faster than the kids on Christmas morning. And now it’s time to really go the extra mile (all the puns are intended) to raise as much money as possible for causes close to everyone’s hearts. 

This year we have a whopping 1,777 walkers – that’s 50% up on last year.  Your massive meanderings are taking the Walkathon all over the world, with teams in 37 different countries, from Turkey to Thailand. How’s that for netwalking?

Helpful hikers from 20 different companies:

With participants from 20 companies in our network, we knew we’d get some fun team names. We think Sirius Walkers will give us serious competition, and Pret a Marcher have definitely got their pieds-à-terre (although their Cinnamon Bunions might get the better of them). 

His Majesty’s Rambling Collective and Never Knowingly Undersoled are two team names that made us giggle, but not enough for us to take our eye off the ball (or our feet off the pavement). We were surprised by the team who chose Platform Shoes though – not the most practical choice for hiking, surely..?

Steps make £££ and there’s only one week to go!

So what is it that makes even the biggest loafers among us get into our trainers? Well, realistically, we know that you lot are a competitive bunch, but the chance to give something back to those less fortunate than ourselves plays a big part too. 

Equal Experts will once again be donating money to charity and for the first time ever all of the charities are customers – past and present! At the end of the Walkathon you will be asked to vote for one of our charities.  Equal Experts will then donate money to that charity based on your total step count.  This year’s charities are:

  1. The Pret Foundation
  2. Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF)
  3. Merlin’s Magic Wand
  4. The Sea Life Trust (a Merlin charity)
  5. The John Lewis Partnership Foundation

So get back off the couch (yes, we see you resting) and get out there, because there’s just one week left to make a difference to these fantastic causes.

Stay tuned to find out how to choose your charity, and keep clocking up the steps – we can’t wait to see how many of you become millionaire walkers this year!

The Equal Experts Walkathon 2023 is a wrap!  May has seen yet another record-breaking challenge, with 1,200 walkers and 99 teams clocking up steps all over the world for good causes.  We hope your feet are getting a well-deserved pamper now!

As ever, we have more incredible stats to boggle your mind.  Here’s the Equal Experts Walkathon 2023 in numbers:

This year, Equal Experts donated £4 to charity for every 10,000 steps you took (that’s 1p per every 25 steps), and gave a choice of charities for walkers to support.  As a result of all your happy feet, we will be making donations to the following charities:

In total, we raised a staggering £135,569!

Stepping up in the top spots

Every single step counted, but some of you went above and beyond to challenge yourselves with 5 millionnaire walkers this year!  That’s no mean feet (pun intended).  It required an average of 32,300 steps, day-in-and-day-out!  Some people went even further, with PerisAhmed nailing 1.5 million steps (which is an average of 27km per day), to be the overall winner. Congratulations to you PerisAhmed, and to our other top 10 walkers overall who were as follows:

  1.    PerisAhmed
  2.    Lucky2023
  3.    Maller
  4.     plp_martin
  5.    BenConrad
  6.    ManyStepsMak
  7.    CrazyCat
  8.    DaniGrando
  9.    jessmitic
  10.    OliviaW

The team who walks together…

Once again you made us laugh with clever team names, unleashed our competitive edges with impressive daily increases, and delighted us with your team spirit as you kept each other going in your group chats. But there can only be one winner, and this year the title goes to EE’s very own Northern Soles! Congratulations(!) and congrats also to the other teams who made the top 10.  You are truly leg-end-ary!

  1.    Northern Sole
  2.    Hakuna Matata
  3.    Pret a Manger Waterloo
  4.    Walk by Example
  5.    Pret UK Property
  6.    Sole Survivors
  7.    Pret US – Too Inspired to be Tired!
  8.    JL ‘appy walkers
  9.    JLP Carb Loaders
  10.     Feet of Engineering

Thank you to everyone who took part. You truly swept us off our feet, and we couldn’t have done it without you! 

It’s been wonderful to see all your pho-toes (sorry!), from dogs and family to wildlife and beautiful vistas.  We’ve especially loved how creative some of you were to make sure you made your step count targets.

It’s that time of year again, and boy do we have some stats to bring you at this point of the Equal Experts Walkathon 2023! On your marks…

What is the Equal Experts Walkathon? 

Each May, we come together as a network, with customers, friends and family, to blaze a trail all around the world whilst raising money for charity. Every year the numbers grow, and this year is no exception, with 1,200 walkers and 99 teams – way more than ever before – counting steps to add £££ to the charity of their choice. 

Once again, we’re delighted to have several customer teams in our ranks, including HMRC, John Lewis & Partners, Waitrose, Disney, Awaze, HMPO, Open University, Hargreaves Lansdown, Travelopia, HACE, Tesco and once again our friends at Pret a Manger. They’re taking it seriously too, with 4 of them currently in the top 10! 

What’s in it for you? 

Quite simply, (and apart from the exercise) it’s fun! The chat stream in the Walkathon app is a daily inspiration of beautiful views, interesting pub names and fascinating wildlife – so much more gets noticed when you’re walking! 

It’s social too. You are egging each other on, with friendly competition, and at our conference last week in London we needn’t have worried about transport – many chose to walk between venues! Lots of connections were made as you snapped the views in iconic Regent’s Park:

Your pooches have been clocking up the steps too.  The legendary Walkathon Watson is having a good month following dog dad Duncan Cheshire – with 4 legs, we reckon he’s doing double his owner’s steps, coming in at a canine 636,600 (there’s still time for him to become a millionaire walker)! 

How your steps add up

We’re so inspired by your energy!  Team names continue to make us smile, with Northern Sole currently in the lead, and Chafing the Dream not too far behind. The aptly named Walt-A-Ton are living up to their name, and we imagine The Red Hot Chilli Steppers dancing their steps, while Feet of Engineering must be pacing at their laptops.  So far, you’ve walked a whopping 4.4 laps of the world.

For every 10,000 steps we take, Equal Experts will donate £4 to charity (that’s 1p per every 25 steps) – here’s a list of the charities you can choose to add your steps to when the Walkathon finishes at the end of May:

In the meantime, please consider donating directly by following the links. 

Keep the photos coming – you might even be selected for “photo of the day” on the Movespring app. We can’t wait to see how far you go!

During May 2022, over 800+ people around the world participated in our annual Equal Experts Walkathon – that’s a lot of you gearing up your activity levels for some friendly competition in the name of good causes. 

5, 6, 7, 8 steps and more to the Walkathon 2022 

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Equal Experts pledged to donate £0.01p for every 20 steps walked per person, and gave a choice of charities for walkers to support. As a result of all your happy feet, we will be making donations to the following charities:

The Pret Foundation – £33,108

Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) (MSF) – £25,158

Save the Children – £23,892

The John Lewis & Partners Give A Little Love charities – £22,063

The British Red Cross – £18,189

In total we raised £122,410 for charity – tripling how much was donated last year!

Some steptacular highlights of the 2022 Walkathon

Top walkers:

This year we had not one but 11 “millionaire” walkers – if you do the maths, they all walked a minimum of 32,300 steps per day x 31 days!  But most walked way more than that from the start and some in fact walked the equivalent of a marathon each day of the entire challenge. 

Congratulations to the overall winner, Sandra Eleutério (aka Sandra_01), from Pret A Manger who walked a staggering 1,561,491 steps (755 miles/1,215 km). She was followed closely by the rest of the top 11 walkers who left the rest of us in the dust!

2. Dionisio Lucca – Pret A Manger (2021 winner!)
3. Mahesh Kumar Jeyaraj – Waitrose
4. Vignesh Maller – Waitrose
5. Daniella Luca – Pret A Manger
6. Daniela Grandio – Pret A Manger
7. Olivia Walsh – Equal Experts
8. Matt McGuire – Equal Experts alumnus
9. Gokul Rajendran – Waitrose
10. Silviu Peride – Pret A Manger
11. Ben Conrad – HMRC

Winning team!

Team Waitrose DigiOps won the Equal Experts Walkathon 2022 by averaging 30,096 steps per day throughout the entire month. This was a team from Waitrose and John Lewis & Partners and was made up of Daniel Ascher, Veera Ragavan Krishnaraj, Naren Ravichandran, Mahesh Kumar Jayaraj, Gokul Rajendran and Vignesh Maller. While we’d love to name them all, we will just list the following top 10 teams who put their heart and soles (pardon the pun) into making this cut:

2. The Walkie-Talkies
3. HEEL Today, Gone TOEmorrow
4. SML Goes Bananas
5. UK Property
6. JLP Trading & Supply Chain
7. JLP Occo
8. Eurotrash
9. Holy Walkamolies
10.Flacon-ee-s

We once again welcomed participants from the Equal Experts network including our customers, friends and family.  And we were thrilled to welcome back many of our friends from Pret A Manger and The Pret Foundation as well as teams from John Lewis & Partners, Waitrose, HMRC, Thames Water, Disney, Awaze and Flaconi.

It’s been wonderful to see the friendly banter, and everyone racking up their steps, with the ultimate goal of doing something good for others who have greater needs than us.

Thank you all for another blisteringly good walkathon!

 




 

 

We are currently at the halfway point of the Equal Experts Walkathon 2022 – and you’re totally smashing it. 

Every May, we organise a charity Walkathon where people sign up to raise money for good causes, by walking as much as possible over the month.  This year, we have once again welcomed our customers, friends and family to join as well and are thrilled that 880+ people are walking all over the world for a good cause – nearly twice as many as last year!

Many of our friends from Pret A Manger have once again joined us in getting their step counts up to help raise money for The Pret Foundation, which supports local charities and projects to help break the cycle of homelessness.  We’re also thrilled to welcome teams from John Lewis & Partners, Waitrose, HMRC, Thames Water, Disney, Awaze and Flaconi.  And we’ve added John Lewis & Partners Give A Little Love charities to our donations list.

Here’s what you’ve achieved so far:

  • Collectively we have already walked 3.2 laps of the world. That equates to £88,261 raised so far!
  • Our top walker (to date) has already walked the equivalent of Amsterdam to Copenhagen!
  • Top teams info: The Waitrose DigiOps team, who are averaging almost 20,000 steps a day (earning £1,480 so far for their chosen charity). Hot on their fundraising heels (literally!) are The Walkie-Talkies.

We always have a good laugh at some of the ingenious team names too – favourites this year include HEEL Today, Gone TOEmorrow, Eurotrash, and Cirque du Sore Legs. Hopefully the joy of seeing how much they’ve raised will make up for the aching calf muscles!

Why walk for charity?
For every 20 steps we take, Equal Experts will donate £0.01p to the following charities. You just choose the one that resonates most, and we do the rest. Apart from the walking – that’s down to you! The more steps we take, the more money Equal Experts will donate.  In the meantime, please consider donating directly by following the links below:

Towards the end of May, we’ll be sending a survey to all participants for them to choose which charity they’d like their steps to be donated to.

Once again, it’s just so exciting to see you all walking and talking all over the world.  Thank you to everyone for the steps you’ve taken so far – you’re helping to make a big difference to some very worthy causes.

During May 2021, over 500 people around the world participated in the annual Equal Experts Walkathon – to keep fit, make friends, and help raise money for a charity of their choice.

With Equal Experts pledging £3 for every 10,000 steps, the following charities will benefit from everyone’s efforts:

And with our hearts going out to our friends in India during the Covid-19 crisis, we added an Indian charity element to our list of charities during the event (charity/ies tbc), for whom we raised £8,850.

All this means that in total we raised £40,130 for charity, making this the most successful walkathon ever!

How many times around the world did we walk?

Across the 540 participants, in 56 teams, we collectively walked a staggering 133,764,316 steps. To put it another way, we walked 95,141km, equivalent to nearly 2.5 times around the world! 

In terms of winners, well – everyone’s a winner! That said, team ‘Walkie-Talkies’ won the 2021 Equal Experts Walkathon by averaging an amazing 20,000 steps a day throughout the entire month.  This was a team from Pret A Manger made up of vickyke, matka, xavier25, yoyoxx, uber69, baldandbankrupt, peterlgw and adrianag.  Congratulations to you all!

And congratulations to “baldandbankrupt” for walking the most steps overall – a massive 1,298,584. That’s the equivalent of walking from the northern tip of Scotland all the way down to the south coast of England.  We’d also like to congratulate the rest of the top 10:

  1. G&T
  2. The 39 Steps
  3. The Walking Dread
  4. The Slow and the Furious
  5. Armasteppon
  6. Holy Walkamolies
  7. Sandwich Way Shall We Go
  8. Her Majesty’s Rambling Collective
  9. One Step Beyond

And the top 9 walkers after “baldandbankrupt” were as follows – and please note that the top 7 were all millionaire walkers, as in they all walked over a million steps each this May – WOW!

  1. magnematt – millionaire walker
  2. elmicas – millionaire walker
  3. lisacopland – millionaire walker
  4. matka – millionaire walker
  5. nitish – millionaire walker
  6. phantomsteps – millionaire walker
  7. maxine_t
  8. vaishaliv
  9. jessmitic

It’s been terrific to welcome family, friends and customers in unprecedented numbers to the walkathon this year.  We were blown away by the enthusiasm of the 180 participants from Pret A Manger, as well as those eager and committed walkers from HMRC, John Lewis and Springer Nature, among others who joined in too.

Everywhere we looked we saw people getting to know one another, grow competitive with their “walking arch enemies,” and share lovely photos from their walks around the world – from New York to Sydney via Bangalore, Pune, Cape Town and many, many more cities around the world.  After such a tough year for so many of us, those beautiful pictures of nature and pets and wildlife really gripped our imaginations (and made us want to travel again).

Thank you everyone – we can’t wait to do it again next year!