It's All in the Game

This may come as a shock, but from the donor's point of view the act of supporting a charity can be a little dry. Corporate-looking websites, payment gateways and shopping carts are the norm, but maybe they lack something to really engage today's audience. Fear not, the technology industry has another concept to save the day: gamification -- the application of game-design to an otherwise dry process -- could be the thing that keeps your donors engaged with your cause.
You may be a gamer -- in which case you probably see the role that gaming could play for charities. But if you're not, and perhaps your teenage son or daughter is, you would be forgiven for wondering how the frivolity of the gaming world might be relevant to the noble art of donor engagement.

First, let's acknowledge the importance of the gaming industry. In 2011 the global video game market was valued at $65 billion (source: Reuters). By comparison, the global music industry -- that's everything: sales of recorded music, music publishing and live performance -- was $68 billion and has been relatively flat for a few years (source: eMarketer). Gaming is a huge and still rapidly growing sector of the entertainment industry.

Now consider the gamers. Research shows that gamers exhibit many qualities that charities look for in a donor. They are super-engaged and they work hard -- see how many hours they put in (apparently the average gamer in a country with a game-playing culture puts in as many hours gaming as he or she did attending school from the age of 9 to 17 -- around 10,080 hours - source: Carnegie Mellon University).

Gamers respond to a challenge -- whether it's the "next level" or uncovering what's called an epic win in the gaming world, a gamer will aspire to reach it. They exhibit high levels of trust to other gamers -- they will often partner with other gamers online to achieve their goals. They love recognition -- whether it's a badge, a ribbon or their name on a leader-board, they are motivated by achievement and the recognition that comes with it. They are innately optimistic -- they expect benefits so they invest the time and energy into the games. They are social -- they form relationships and identify with a community of like-minded gamers.

According to Jane McGonigal of the Institute For The Future (IFTF), gamers commonly believe they are better people in a game than in real life -- i.e. that real life is broken but they can achieve something in a virtual world like World Of Warcraft or Minecraft. Sad though that may be, it is something that charities will need to recognize if they want to engage with future generations.

So how does a charity benefit from gamification? The basic tenets of fundraising still hold true -- you need to recruit, engage, measure and grow your support base. Gamification can help with the first two. A simple, rewarding game, with a registration feature can be an effective recruitment tool if you can manage to make it viral. It may even reward the player for making a donation too. Take a look at iHobo, developed for UK charity DePaul. It's an iPhone app that invites you to spend three days in the company of a homeless person and help him survive. The app raised money, but also raised a lot of awareness that opened the door to larger grants.

And you don't need to develop a computer game either. Gamification is also about making the process of supporting the charity rewarding. That used to mean sending donors a book or a video about your work. But it may be more effective to accord a status to a donor, to allow him or her to publish the "super donor" status on a chosen social-media site and to earn that recognition that games provide them.

And lastly, why not harness the ingenuity of your game-playing constituency by inviting them to come up with creative solutions to the world's problems? IFTF did just that by creating games that blend fictional game scenarios will real-word problems and invite gamers to do what they do best -- seek meaning by solving problems in the game, and maybe contributing to a real-world solution.

All of which leads me to conclude that maybe those endless hours that my teenage son spends in front of a games console are not wasted after all. He is learning how to be a problem-solver, trusted collaborator and -- who knows? -- maybe a philanthropist for the 21^st century.

Robin Fisk is the global fundraising product manager for ASI Europe.