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Blogger Widget Helps P&G Clean Water Initiative

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Procter & Gamble is asking bloggers to use their power as agents of change to help generate clean water for developing countries and disaster relief by embedding a donation-triggering widget in their sites.

For each reader's click on the widgets, P&G will donate enough clean water for an individual for one day (two liters), in the form of packets of PUR, a water purifying technology developed by P&G and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The program's goal is 100,000 days of clean water, and it will continue until that goal is reached, according to Aja Silvas, P&G U.S. operations external relations specialist.

The P&G Give Health Clean Water Blogivation initiative is the latest effort to support the P&G Children's Safe Drinking Water Program, a nonprofit that has contributed 2.4 billion liters of clean water since its launch in 2004.

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P&G has been involving the public via an annual, coupon-redemption tie-in through its Give Health program, in which each coupon redeemed from its newspaper-distributed brandSAVER coupon booklets during a set period of time triggers a P&G clean-water donation.

This year, the company devised the Blogivation initiative, announced during early August's BlogHer '10 conference, as a way to extend the donations drive through the year, says Silvas.

The initiative began with a contest, held for three weeks during August, in which female bloggers were encouraged to publish a post about why they are passionate about safe drinking water, and embed a P&G-supplied voting widget in the post.

The blogger who generated the most clicks/one day's water donations through the widget -- Pamela Crane, of Blood:Water Mission -- won a trip to join the P&G Children's Safe Drinking Water Program expedition to Africa and a $15,000 donation to her favorite global water crisis charity. The contest, which had 34 female blogger participants, generated approximately 21,000 days of water, reports Silvas.

Now, P&G is encouraging as many bloggers as possible to participate in the same basic Blogivation concept, to reach the 100,000-days-of-water goal. While there are no prizes per se, P&G will highlight some participating bloggers on the portal for the initiative --givehealthblogivation.com -- and in P&G's Facebook and Twitter presences.

Bloggers are currently signing up through the portal to participate, and the widgets will go live as of Nov. 1.

In order to drive awareness and participation in the initiative, P&G is leveraging its existing social media presences and relationships with cause-minded media and bloggers, in addition to encouraging participating bloggers to raise awareness among their readers.

Give Health's partner on the program, Changents.com (an organization that "connects people who are changing the world with those who help them") will also leverage their social media assets and network to spread the word.

In addition, P&G will feature digital "story-telling" content on the givehealthblogivation portal through the blogs of Greg Allgood (director of the Children's Safe Drinking Water Program), Pamela Crane and humanitarian photographer Cate Cameron. These blogs will publish inspirational, behind-the-scene accounts of clean-water efforts in action.

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