COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., Feb. 12, 2008 – Compassion International, one of the world’s largest Christian child-development organizations, has launched a blog as part of its emphasis on social networking.

Compassion bloggers began posting at Blog.Compassion.com today. The blog will be updated frequently by a variety of content contributors. It is intended to provide value-added content, beyond what is found on Compassion’s corporate site. A wide range of topics will be featured including Christian music artist partnerships, church engagement, child advocacy, child development, reports from the field and much more.

“The primary focus of the Compassion blog is to energize sponsors and donors to become active advocates for children in poverty,” said Tom Emmons, Internet Marketing Manager of Compassion International. “In addition, our prayer is that the blog will increase public awareness and involvement in Compassion’s mission, develop an effective brand experience and create a highly interactive and responsive communication channel between the ministry and its supporters.”

Compassion also is hosting a dozen influential Christian bloggers, including Beliefnet columnist David Kuo, recording artist Shaun Groves and HM magazine editor Doug Van Pelt, on a trip to Uganda that ends Monday. They are seeing Compassion at work in the lives of poor children and their families and posting on their personal blogs about the experience.

Finally, as part of a month-long emphasis on blogging, the first 500 people who post on their personal blogs about their Compassion experiences and link to Compassion’s site will receive free scrapbooks.

Last month, Compassion received the Impact Award for Poverty Relief from MySpace.com, one of the largest social-networking Web sites. The award recognizes members of the MySpace community for the positive impact they’ve had on our culture and how they use MySpace to multiply their reach.

Compassion works with more than 65 denominations, 4,000 indigenous church partners and 900,000 children in Africa, Asia, Central and South America and the Caribbean.

Since 1952, Compassion has touched the lives of more than 1.6 million children and has been recognized for its financial integrity with top ratings and recommendations by several of the nation’s leading not-for-profit “watchdog” organizations.

For information on sponsoring a child, visit www.compassion.com or call 800.336.7676, Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. MST.

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