A few weeks ago, a new site that makes it simple and convenient for casual gamers to give back simply by playing some of their favorite kinds of games caught my attention. It’s called GamesThatGive.net and it just launched this summer, offering people who play casual games at any level for any amount of time a great way to become more socially responsible and give back. I had actually been looking for something like it to get behind and was surprised that there wasn’t really anything else out there. I had the opportunity to talk to co founder and CEO, Adam Archer this afternoon to find out more about what they stand for.

GA: So, tell me about your role at Games That Give
Adam: I’m the CEO and one of the co founders with Games that Give. We came together because we shared a vision, which was we wanted to combine existing behavior and new technologies to help people help charities. So, one of the things that we realized was, if you go around and you ask people why they’re not doing more to help people less fortunate than themselves or help the charities that they believe in, everybody has the same answer. Everybody says, “I really wish I was doing more, but I don’t have the time, or I don’t have the money, or I don’t have the outlet. I don’t know how to help, given the time and money that I do have.” And so, there are a few different ways out there to use existing behavior to help folks. But we wanted to come up with a fun easy way for people to use existing behavior and so casual gaming is that way. It’s that vehicle. Casual gaming is huge. There are over 130 million casual gamers in America. That play, on average, over 5 hours a week. So, it’s a fun way to help folks. What we did was we went out and we talked to a very limited number of non profits that we had great respect for that were high visibility, high credibility, breadth of cause and we told them about Games That Give and they wanted to come and join us. We talked to a small set of advertisers, Domino’s Pizza, Dial Soap, Quaker, Pepsi, Starbucks, and MasterCard to name a few. And they decided to join us as well. And so we’ve created this sort of holistic charitable gaming platform which allows people to, in the time they were using anyway to play casual games, to raise money for their favorite charity.

GA: When you talked about putting this project together, you said “we.” I’m assuming you worked with a few other people… And how did you come together, did you know each other already?
Adam: So our team is – there’s only 4 of us that work on it full time. Myself, Chris Bell, who’s become a great friend of mine. We were introduced to each other through one of our advisers. He’s our COO, he’s sort of our do it all business guy, finance, strategy, marketing. Cie Nicholson, who was actually the CMO of Pepsi North America, I was also introduced to her through one of our advisers. Obviously she has tremendous marketing experience. And the fourth full time member of our team is Kris Goss who’s been a great friend of mine for years and years and he’s our lead web developer. He’s technical. We have some other incredible folks helping us, Mike Wood is our PR specialist and has done a ton of strategy work for us. and that’s the team. It’s a well rounded team that just kind of loves what we’re doing and this idea of using existing behavior plus technology is just going to be – it just feels good for everybody.

GA: And how did you go about deciding what charities to approach and include in this project?
Adam: First and foremost, we wanted to partner with charities that we had a ton of respect for. In addition to that, we wanted breadth of cause. You know, one of the mistakes that other new media plus non profit entities have done is they’ve welcomed aboard too many charities, so nobody feels like they own it, it’s hard to navigate, it’s hard to see the impact they are having with any one particular charity. An example of this is Facebook Causes. They have thousands and thousands of non profits and some of them haven’t seen too much impact. So we wanted to focus in on a limited number of non profits with a breadth of cause that, for lack of a better term, just gets it. They understand new media, they understand our model of casual gaming, and the in game advertising model, and they were excited to work with us to get people to play games for their charity.

GA: Okay, and you said the in game advertising model. So how exactly does it work when people come to play, I know they can see how much money has been raised for each particular charity while they’re playing, but how does it actually work?
Adam: It’s pretty straightforward. We charge our advertisers CPM rate. And 70% of our advertising revenue goes to the user selected charities. So users come into the site, they select their charity they want to play for, they play, and 70% of the advertising revenue goes to that charity. It’s simple and straightforward. The better they do at the games, the longer they play, the more they donate.

GA: Do players have to sign up in order for their time played to count?
Adam: No, so you could play completely anonymously. We just won’t track how much you donate if you play anonymously. But once you sign up for a Games That Give account, then you can track your impact and you can see how much you’ve donated to the charity of your choice.

GA: And when you do sign up as a user and you pick the charity that you’d like to support, and that stays the same until you change it?
Adam: Right, so you sign up for your account and you pick your favorite charity, so every time you come back to the site, you’ll be playing for your favorite charity, unless you decide to change it.

GA: And then what happens if you don’t pick one?
Adam: If you don’t choose one, we will give you a charity to play for, and you can change it any time you want to.

GA: And is that random?
Adam: Yes, one of our 13 at random.

GA: Do you play?
Adam: I play all the time. My favorite game is Solitaire, my very close second is Bubble Burst.

GA: I see a lot of classic favorite games on the site. Do you have partnerships with developers, or plans for new games coming out?
Adam: Yeah we do have partnerships with developers, so we don’t make the games ourselves, but we do make changes to them. And we plan to roll out two games a month moving forward, so always new candy in the store.

GA: Awesome. Do you have anything else to add?
Adam: I just want to thank everybody who’s out there who’s reading this article for playing and donating and having fun. Please don’t hesitate to email us, there’s a link on our site to give us any feedback at all.

You can start playing and donating at the Games that Give Website.
Follow them on Twitter.
Or add the Games that Give Facebook Application

The non profits that benefit from people who play at Games That Give include UNICEF, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Mercy Corps, Feeding America, Access, The Wilderness Society, Ronald McDonald House, Breast Cancer Network of Strength, Jumpstart, DoSomething.org, United Way, American Heart Association, and City Year. For more information on these charities, you can check out the Charities page of their website.

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