We’ve been fortunate to partner with some great brands on a number of social cause marketing initiatives over the years, but the WaterTank Facebook app that we developed for the Levi’s® brand is our most ambitious one to date. Launched on World Water Day 2011, the app promotes Levi’s® Water<Less jeans, which use an innovative manufacturing technique to save millions of liters of water. Even better, it gives Levi’s® fans the opportunity to complete simple, social challenges that increase awareness of the global water crisis and help to solve it, via a partnership with Water.org.

The Water<Less tab is the default landing tab for non-fans, and it shares the Water<Less message in a variety of ways, including a pair of educational videos and several links to Water<Less product pages on Levis.com. Because this content is not like-gated and does not require user permissions to access, all Facebook users have access to all of the content, regardless of whether they’re a fan of Levi’s® Facebook Page or not. With no barrier to entry, it’s the perfect hub for an integrated social campaign.

The landing tab also contains a simple, strong call to action (”Tweet. Check in. Pledge.”) above a “Play WaterTank” button that takes users to the WaterTank app—the core of the Facebook Water<Less experience.

WaterTank uses simple, compelling game mechanics to educate and challenge fans to take small but meaningful actions to increase awareness of the global water crisis and what they can do to help. Completed challenges “unlock” up to 200 million virtual liters of clean drinking water, representing the Levi’s® brand contribution to Water.org. Users can choose to play for fun or register with the app to play for prizes, including a trip to a community that has been helped by Water.org

Some of the challenges are extremely simple—Like the Page, tweet a bit.ly link or share a post on Facebook. Others require users to challenge their friends to join them in playing WaterTank, make a contribution to Water.org or pledge to wash their jeans once every two weeks instead of once a week, to save water.

Other challenges require the player to get out into the world and do something. At each Levi’s® store, QR codes have been placed in in-store advertising. The QR codes are linked to a mobile version of the app that award points to the player when they grant it permission to access their Facebook account. We also leveraged theFacebook Places API to award points for in-store checkins.

The app boasts seamless Flash integration with the backend to visualize a tremendous amount of data dynamically, including the amount of water unlocked by all users, the challenges that are available to the player, friends who have completed each challenge, global and friends-only leaderboards and a real-time feed of game play.

Best of all, fans are engaging with the app and spreading the word about it. In its first 72 hours, it saw over 50,000 page views, with more than 20,000 challenges completed. As of this morning—six days after its launch—the campaign is already one-third of the way to its 200 million-gallon goal.

From raising awareness of an important cause to promoting an innovative product, WaterTank has been an extremely successful activation campaign. We’re very grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Levi’s® on such a challenging and rewarding activation campaign, and we look forward to continuing to partner with ambitious brands and integrating their vision into social campaigns.