Last Friday I spent the afternoon talking to Henk Witteveen and Dimitri Schouten at Upstream Advertising about the plans for the Dow Live Earth Run for Water Amsterdam, this year’s cultural festival De Parade, 3D holograms and other fun stuff. Henk and Dimitri have over ten years experience in organizing major events like the Dance Parade in Rotterdam that attracted over 400,000 people last year. Last summer they agreed to take up the challenge to make the Dutch Live Earth event a success.

The venue they have chosen is the Olympic Stadium, built for the 1928 Summer Olympics. With the support of run2day and others, they expect to attract over 20,000 runners. The 6k run through the centre of Amsterdam will bring the participants back to the stadium for a concert that will feature local artists like Rigby and Valerious. We have teamed up with Hank from het goede doel sms to be able to tie SMS donations during this campaign directly to featured Akvo projects, which will in turn be linked to local celeberties.

It is great that the local government of Amsterdam has provided the logistical support to help make this event possible. Veronica and Radio 538 have agreed to be the national media partners to help build momentum and exposure.

This short trailer for Live Earth Amsterdam has been developed by Jorn, intern at Upstream Advertising.

A local website has been developed where you can register to run and buy concert tickets for this event.

The Dow Live Earth Run for Water aims to be the world's largest-ever initiative focused on raising awareness and funds to tackle the global water crisis. All the projects that are being funded from money raised globally can feature web and SMS reporting via the Akvo system. Click here to see a list of cities now open for registration or click here to find out how you can host a Friends of Live Earth event near you.

We will be sharing more news about the plans for the Dow Live Earth Run for Water Amsterdam over the coming weeks. It's great to see how far we have come since the launch in New York, last October.

Peter van der Linde is the partner director at Akvo.