Content We Love: Mundipharma’s Innovative Use of Gaming Shines Light on Cancer Awareness

Happiness is when you are drowning in a sea of press releases that need to be handled, and there is one release that instantly catches your attention, because it presents you with a car-racing game to play! So if my supervisor comes to my work station and asks, “Abby, what are you up to here?” I, with eyes-brightening, can legitimately say, “I am checking if a website URL in this client’s press release is opening, and the page features a cool racing game for fund raising!” I would say this is one of the best applications of gamification — doing it for fund-raising campaigns.

Mundipharma is a pharmaceutical group with a mission to “substantially improve the quality of life of patients by alleviating the global burden of pain”. Seeing the rising prevalence of cancer in Asia, the group launched a three-day campaign named #HumanRace this September, in an attempt to raise awareness of the disease in the region. This is how the campaign works: Players can access www.human-race.net to participate in a virtual car-racing game and for every race completed, the company will donate SGD1 to the Singapore Cancer Society, regardless of the final ranking of the players.

Read the release here for more details.

Gamification is defined as “the use of game elements and game-design techniques in non-game contexts” in the book, For The Win, co-authored by Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter [1]. The term should not be restricted in a narrow sense to creating games simply for its own sake, as The Guardian has put it, but rather, gamification is “about how using game mechanics can lead to desired behavioural outcomes. It’s this very premise that makes gamification work for any cause.” [2]

The benefits of gamifying (or introducing game elements to) your press release, products and services, business or any other causes (in the case of Mundipharma, it is to raise money) are:

• Make it Fun. The pursuit of happiness and enjoyment is part of human nature; Gamification makes your cause more attractive to the players.
• Boost Engagement. As opposed to promoting your cause to the players in a one-way manner, such as a press release on a company’s charitable deed, gamification raises the audience engagement level a notch by making the company’s cause become the player’s cause as well. In the case of Mundipharma, it is the company’s goal to raise funds for the Singapore Cancer Society, but by adding game dynamics into the campaign, the cause and its results (the proceeds) are now in the players’ hands.
• Come Back For More (Loyalty). Gamification does not only leave a deeper impression on the players if done correctly (or incorrectly, either way works I guess), it also brings tangible benefits other than the funds being raised. The #HumanRace game ran for three days and the total play time, according to the company, was equivalent to more than nine years of game play or 79,000 hours. According to the press release, the company has attributed the success of the campaign to the simple and easy-to-play game design. It is not hard to imagine that there are players like me who came back to the game more than once to earn a higher ranking for each race completed (it’s a game!), and the positive feeling from knowing that one is playing this game for a charitable purpose (a win-win situation).

The company recorded a higher number of clicks on its site during the race period:

“Active interaction with the corporate website also rose significantly during the campaign period with a 600% increase in organic website visits and a 1,900% increase in cross-channel, unique user reach.” The company has also promoted the campaign on digital social platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, so the influence of SOCIAL MEDIA is also a point that should be noted.

True, you don’t get the chance to design a game for every business campaign you are planning, but let’s recall what we saw earlier in this article: gamification is more than just creating games for its own sake. It is likely that we have already seen gamification in our everyday lives, just with different mechanics. Gamification is involved when consumers (or players) collect stamps after every purchase to redeem freebies, accumulate air miles for free flight tickets, and answer questionnaires for coupons or discounts. The list goes beyond profit-making businesses into the fields of education, human resources, and even sustainability. Here’s an interesting read on how gamification can help humans live more sustainably.

While it is important to know that gamification is not a cure-all, as it cannot save an underperforming business [3], it is surely a pinch of salt worth adding when one is considering ways to enhance the flavour of one’s product/service and whatever else is being promoted.

Notes:

[1] Werbach, Kevin, and Dan Hunter. For the win: How game thinking can revolutionize your business. Wharton Digital Press, 2012.
[2] Marrins, Kirsty. “Five ways charities use gamification.” The Guardian. Web. 17 Apr. 2014. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2014/apr/17/gamification-charity-gaming
[3] Zichermann, Gabe, and Christopher Cunningham. Gamification by design: Implementing game mechanics in web and mobile apps. ” O’Reilly Media, Inc.”, 2011.

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The blog post was written by Abby Tsang, Editor at PR Newswire. Please indicate the source and link for reproduction.