by Danny Johnson, Partner & Founder

Creative Asylum has taken on some incredible not-for-profit clients in Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals and the National Association of Music Education. Both have noble missions – saving kids’ lives and saving arts and music education in public schools. Our goal for both is to harness the social web to create long-term, virally fueled fundraising movements. It’s a huge mission and one we’re super excited about.

As we look for ways to break through for our clients, the topic of integrating cause marketing into social gaming arises frequently. And the more research we do into this, the more we realize how very new the subject is – there is no truly mature data or case studies on this yet. We’re generally finding there are 2 different levels here: truly integrated efforts and more perishable, “stunt” oriented efforts.

If it’s a quick, targeted donation campaign, you might be well served by a campaign like the one Activision did with WOW and Make-A-Wish: http://www.joystiq.com/2009/11/11/virtual-wow-pet-sells-out/. It worked. They sold a lot of pets. The key is really all about delivering value to an audience large enough to move the needle. However, this campaign had a bit of backlash to it, which is always the danger when you mix a for-profit and not-for-profit effort.

There are also companies that specialize in cause marketing social games that are specifically designed and built to drive donations. There is even one built specifically for our client, Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals: https://www.facebook.com/hospitopia?sk=wall. Of course, the challenge here is building a game experience that is robust enough and evolves quickly enough that it can compete. That takes money and time, and unless it’s a major game company, it’s going to hurt. We’re looking at these, but we can’t find any examples of recent games that made a big impact.

And that’s what it’s really about, right? Making a big impact. The one thing we see across the board in all cause marketing/gaming successes is VALUE – you’d better deliver something…an experience…a goodie…that is of meaningful value to the audience or you are dead. And to do just that at a cost that makes sense for a pro bono client within a small agency like ours.

So here’s a call to the Zyngas, the Playdoms, the Playfishes of the world – you have a chance to use your audiences to make a huge difference in the lives of kids. We’ll be calling you, and hopefully you will pick up the phone.