YoVille: Rally Your Friends and Protect the Gulf

YoVille Protect the Gulf
The Charity Pet will be coming soon to YoVille. YoVille has teamed up with Audubon to help raise money to fund the rescue efforts in the Gulf and protect the animals fallen victim to the catastrophic oil spill. Platinum Ninja has posted an Official Blog on YoVille.com. Read how you can help out after the jump. Hey Everyone,

Help YoVille and Audubon protect the wildlife in the Gulf's habitat!! Coming Soon! After this catastrophic oil spill, we want to team up and help raise money to fund the rescue efforts in the Gulf to protect these animals and the future of our planet. Let's check out how YoVille and the Audubon is helping Protect the Gulf and find out how you can help out too!!

YoVille and Audubon

To help aid this disaster YoVille will be giving players an opportunity to purchase Charity Pets. 50% of all proceeds from these special creatures will support the recovery effort and help Audubon Society protect this wildlife and habitat.

The Audubon Society's Mission: "Audubon's mission is to conserve and restore natural ecosystems, focusing on birds, other wildlife, and their habitats for the benefit of humanity and the earth's biological diversity." To check out more information about the Audubon Society please read here: http://www.audubon.org/

How You Can Help Save the Gulf!

Whether it is purchasing a Charity Pet or Rallying your friends you can help spread the word about this terrible oil spill and get involved. Wouldn't it be awesome to help protect the Gulf's Wildlife and habitat while playing your favorite game at the same time Well you can so let's find out how you can help!

Charity Pet
YoVille Help Save the Gulf
Coming soon we'll be releasing 4 new Charity Pets to help support the efforts to repair the damage caused to their ecosystem. There will be one new pet per week, for a total of four weeks, which will be available to purchase. Expect to see a Pelican, Sea Turtle, Otter and more! Remember, YoVille will be forking over half of all of the proceeds from these pets that will go to help protect the Gulf.

To purchase a Charity Pet you will click on the Protect the Gulf Icon in the upper right hand corner. You will then receive a dialog and preview of the pet available that week to buy. If you want to help out click "Buy Pet" and purchase this pet!

Also, after you buy this pet you will be able to let your friends know that you protected the Gulf by posting a Feed that your friends can click in on to help too. Make sure to share how you are trying to make a difference with your friends and do your part!

Rally your Friends
YoVille Rally your friends
You can also help spread the word by Rallying your Friends. To Rally your Friends you will need to click the Protect the Gulf Icon and then click Rally your Friends. This will post a feed to your friends to let them know you are helping protect the Gulf.

We will be giving you an extra incentive to spread the word around this catastrophic disaster. If 10 of your Friends click in on your Help Save the Gulf Feed you will receive an Exclusive Balloon which you can carry all over YoVille. So make sure to Rally your Friends by posting these feeds and clicking in through your friend's feeds as well to help bring awareness to this Oil Spill and get an exclusive item.
YoVille Rally Your Friends Wall Post
Well that's about all folks! Stay tuned for this opportunity to help protect the gulf coming soon!! Most importantly tell your friends about this opportunity and share how easy it is to help out a habitat in need. This is your chance and ours to make a difference while playing YoVille! So let's all rally together and help out!

CityVille players deliver a quarter million dollars for US tornado relief

After the huge charity drives that were Haiti and Japan, Zynga ran a noticeably less aggressive campaign in promoting relief efforts for the massive US tornado outbreak of late April. Six states were hit, the most affected being Alabama, and news outlets called it the worst natural disaster since Hurricane Katrina.

Only Zynga's CityVille and Mafia Wars had special virtual items made for player donations. CityVille offered Tornado Relief Fund Blueberries for a week and promised 100 percent of the funds to Save the Children; while Mafia Wars (after demands from fans) responded with a Disaster Relief Truck with 100 percent of the funds going to Direct Relief International.

Today, Zynga sent out a thank you email to their CityVille players, letting us know that they've managed to raise exactly $226,027 USD. There's no telling how much of this was from the precise sale of CityVille blueberries or direct donations via the charity's website (which Zynga promoted across all its games), but after watching Zynga raise $1 million USD for Japan within 36 hours, a quarter million dollars within a week pales in comparison. On the other hand, I think most of us are grateful they've done so, because they're certainly not obligated to try.

Mobile social game taps into 700K player base for children's charity

Parallel Kingdom 700,000K players
What do you do when you're a well-respected mobile game with 700K players worldwide? You design a virtual soup can helmet and sell it to your players for charity! At least, that's what Per Blue's Parallel Kingdom is doing (with Playmob) for the SOS Children relief in North Kenya.

SOS Children's Villages is an independently operated, international organization that's been saving kids since 1949. Currently, funds are needed for emergency food and medical aid due to a severe drought in the area. Soup Can Helmets cost 550 Food each (the virtual currency of Parallel Kingdom), which is the equivalent of $5.50 USD and enough to feed three children. Since the helmet is priced with Food, it's possible for you to not spend any real money on the helmet for it to still count. (In fact, for those of you who haven't liked the game's Facebook page yet, there's a free 100 Food offer that you can use towards a helmet purchase.)

According to Per Blue, this charity drive is at its halfway point with only a week left to go. So far, 550 Soup Can Helmets have been sold, which means 1,650 children have been cared for. If you play the game, you can buy the Soup Can Helmet in the PK Swag section of your local Trade Post until September 29.
Parallel Kingdom Donate Food
If you're new to the game and feeling adventurous, then after the tutorial stage, click on the Food tab on the bottom of your game screen to reach the Get Food menu. You'll see the Donate Food option, but it's really just a notice for the charity drive. Instead, you need to go to Travel, click on a Trade Hub (the one in Madison, WI is one of the two biggest ones), and locate your Local Trade Post, which should be a white building with a red roof buried under a dozen other players who are represented as little heads. Finally, you need to be at Level 2 to be allowed to purchase the helmet. (If you get lost, fire up the in-game chat. Special thanks goes to MisMoon, MoldyBanana, and ZeroGr@vity for their help.)
Parallel Kingdom Trade Post
Parallel Kingdom is best described as FourSquare meets a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game). It surpassed a half million players in June, was voted 2009 Best Augmented Reality App Second Place (first place went to XMG Studio Inc.'s Pandemica) and 2009 Best MMO Game Third Place (beaten by ngmoco's Eliminate Pro, with Miraphonic's Epic Pet Wars in first place). Although Parallel Kingdom is not a true Facebook game (its Facebook game app simply links you to register on the website), it does possess Facebook Connect and can be played on your PC with a web browser.

Would you try out a game just to donate to charity? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment