Giving Through Gaming – How Publishers Can Help Good Causes Through Their Games

Over the last few years, gaming platforms have played an increasing role in promoting charitable initiatives, with platforms such as Twitch allowing for huge, community-driven gaming events aimed at benefiting charities. Last year’s annual Z Event, for example, earned over €10 million for Action Against Hunger. Operating in the mobile sphere, it is with this growing association in mind that we’ve launched a new donation capability to our Offer Wall, allowing mobile gamers to give to causes they support while playing their favorite mobile games.

How does this help charities?

The Offer Wall is a way for publishers to earn money from advertisers who wish to publish offers on a specific app. These offers are featured on the Offer Wall presented to a user during his engagement with a publisher’ app, with publishers typically earning revenue by receiving a share from advertisers once an offer has been completed.

This new capability is very simple. It represents an evolution of this traditional ‘reward’ ad model – where players receive in-game bonuses, such as in-game currency, unlocking levels, extra lives and others, – in return for completing an offer as a form of ad engagement. With donation offers, mobile gamers are not only presented with offers for game related rewards – but a new kind of offer: the option to donate money to a cause, directly from the offer wall

In app advertising is one of the fastest growing advertising markets in the world, growing steadily and in strong numbers for a few consecutive years. It was a $295B market in 2021, up 23% YoY and poised to hit $350B in 2022 (according to Data.ai). This unique ad format enables organizations to reach an entire user base that wasn’t open to them before – highly interacted gamers that are scrolling through the Offer Wall on their frequent use of their mobile. No one takes a cut from the donation a user chooses to give, and we are just putting the decision right at gamers’ fingertips and making it as easy as possible for them to support the causes they value while they play.

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Why did we choose to implement donation capability to our Offer Wall?

As a company, we are very conscious about our social footprint. We also understand the potential impact of ad campaigns in bringing about societal change, seeing how well they deliver for for-profit players like app developers and other advertisers. We traditionally work closely with our partners, listen to them and act on their requests. This initiative also came up in one of our conversations with partners, and together, we understood this is something we need to create.

Gamers want to give

The World Giving Index for 2021 noted that more people were giving money (31%) in 2021 than in any of the last five years. This tallies with the emergence of the conscious consumer – people who want to see their values reflected in the businesses they supportAnd we’re seeing this sentiment resonate in our data. Since we introduced the new capability, donation offers have seen a 128% increase in clicks compared to the same offers previously run as Purchase offers.

What we love the most about the new offers is how we got Offer Wall users to spend – but on a cause they find important. Offer Wall engagement is designed for those users who prefer spending their time not money . Usually, offers are meant to be the way for a user to progress in a game or win currency – but do so in a way that requires no spending. What we’ve seen is that the same users that came in with no intention to spend money are more than willing to open their wallet to support the charitable causes that resonate with them.

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Why should developers and advertisers include this capability in games?

In addition to supporting charities, such as American Cancer Society, Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, Save the Children and many more, this new Offer Wall provides great rewards for publishers. Due to the huge increase in engagement this new capability drove, publishers saw 28% revenue increases in a week. Similarly, when gamers were prompted to click on Donation offers, advertisers saw huge gains, with click-through rates increasing 65% and conversions growing 15%, compared to traditional Purchase offers.

What we love most about donation offers is the win-win-win situation they created, providing tangible benefits to everyone involved in this process. Most notably, it represents a huge win for charities, as they reach users willing to spend their money for donations when they would otherwise have avoided any spend in the first place, demonstrating the demand among gamers to contribute to good causes when the ability to do so is just a click away.