“More charities than ever are looking at games”: Meet Cause+Select, the platform linking the games industry to top charities

The video games sector is no stranger to charity. Industry organisations like GamesAid and SpecialEffect are long-established, in addition to the speedrunning event Games Done Quick, Yogscast’s Jingle Jam and Humble Bundle (owned by GamesIndustry.biz parent IGN Entertainment) that have seen developers, publishers and content creators raising money for a variety of good causes.

But charities are facing a hard time. According to Wayne Emanuel, the founder and director of consultancy Ctrl+Impact, the geopolitical space – such as the closure of international development organisation USAID – has put more pressure on these organisations than ever.

“More charities than ever are looking at diversifiying their income and they’re looking at games as a place to do that,” Emanuel tells GamesIndustry.biz. In response, Ctrl+Impact created the Cause+Select platform in partnership with publishing agency ICO, to link up charities with the games industry, and solve the problems accumulating on both sides.

“There’s an increased interest and outreach going to game developers, publishers, creators to support those charitiy initiatives, whether it is for sponsorships, charity codes, livestream support,” Emanuel says. “There’s just so many more asks. Game developers and publishers have said it has become quite saturated. It’s very hard for developers and creators to become strategic about it, as opposed to reactive.”

Another problem facing developers, publishers and content creators was that, according to Emanuel, partnerships with charities often did not feel like true partnerships.

“A lot of the campaigns felt quite one-sided,” he says. “If you’re trying to build a long-term relationship, it can’t be just about them doing a good thing. It needs to be mutually beneficial.”

The final problem facing charities being involved in the video games space is a question of knowledge. Some organisations, such as War Child and Make a Wish have industry veterans Miles Jacobson and Rob Small respectively, who can help these organisations understand video games; many do not.

“Unless you have someone who’s well-versed and knowledgeable about video games already in your organization, it’s very hard to really understand all the terminologies that exist within the space,” Emanuel says. “It’s very hard to get into the sector.”

As a result of these frustrations and frictions, Emanuel started to build a platform, the precursor for what would become Cause+Select. The platform is pretty simple; charities put details about the campaigns they are working on and what they are looking for. Games companies and content creators can then filter by factors such as causes and regions to find organisations and pushes that they want to be part of.

“They can filter all those bits, see all the campaigns and then they can find more information, and follow or express interest,” Emanuel explains. “Once you express interest that then goes to the charity, and they can then approve that connection. As a platform, at that point we’re done. Essentially, what we’ve done is, we’ve introduced those two parties together. They can then continue that conversation offline. It’s really a connecting service, but we wanted to give as much information to both sides as possible for them to make an informed choice.”

At the moment, the Cause+Select platform is available in beta. It’s currently free, and the long-term plan is for this to remain the case for developers, publishers and content creators, charities pay what Emanuel describes as a “nominal fee” to use the service. The platform launched with limited number of charities, including suicide prevention organsation Calm, US-based Gamers Outreach, youth breast cancer charity CoppaFeel, WWF and Make a Wish. Emanuel says that the idea is to get as many developers, publishers and content creators for a year-long beta, before tweaking the platform.

“Once that’s done, we’ll open up the platform to more charities,” he says.

Cause+Select is open to working with more or less any charity, so long as they are officially registered with the Charity Commission and have a charity number. But the main draw needs to be that they are organisations that need help navigating the games industry waters.

“The idea of the platform is to empower charities to better understand the space,” Emanuel explains. “We have basic things like a glossary for them to understand the different terminologies that they might need in terms of fundraising within gaming. But it’s really to allow easy access for all parties to find new partners. And the hope is that we can open up to more parties in the future.”

The charities that Cause+Select is working with are generally looking to raise income or awareness. As for why games companies want to work with charities, it generally boils down to staff being passionate about a specific cause, and tax incentives. Emanuel points to another benefit to games firms: access to talent.

“There’s the reality that charities have an immense amount of value that is mostly untapped,” he says. “Charities have access to high profiles, ambassadors, and a lot of the time they do a great job of sharing that value. For example, in the music space you might get a collaboration between a particular high profile artist. That hasn’t really been done in video games. When I was at War Child, we worked on a project with Bandai Namco, a game called 11-11: Memories Retold. We worked on a DLC for it and were able to get Carrie Mulligan, who was a War Child ambassador and actress, to do a voiceover in that game. That’s an immense value to something like that, and there was no cost to that. That was done through the charity. It made me think, actually, there’s a lot more value that we’re not really tapping into.

“Another example was when I was on a campaign with Bethesda. We did a live concert at the Hammersmith Apollo and because of our connections in the music space, we were able to get access to the venue and lower costs. Just from a marketing perspective that lowered that budget and their costs. The point of the platform is really to showcase the value that charities have, beyond just simply doing the good thing itself.”

“Especially now where resources are tight and challenging… I feel like the charity sector really has a lot of ability to amplify, and allow game studios to access things they might not necessarily have been able to do in the past.”

Ultimately, Emanuel says Cause+Select’s primary aim is to have a real impact on the world.

“A lot of good work has been done, but it’s very hard for us as an industry to say that we have contributed to this degree or created this impact,” he says. “For us to be able to say that x number of studios have done something, or a certain number of creators have been able to fundraise this amount of money and have really made a real impact – for young people or the environment or people with disabilities – as an industry we can say that this is the tangible impact that we’ve been able to create. That would be phenomenal.”