We are extremely excited to announce our official partnership with our first charity, Sightsavers.

In our previous posts, we talked about the importance of getting involved, who we are and a few other fun topics around our first mobile game.

Today we are taking things one step further and will talk about why we chose to work with Sightsavers and how we are collaborating.

As always, let’s start with the why?

In the early days of forming HAVE, we asked ourselves how we would pick charities to work with. After initial debates, we decided on a few distinct points that are important to us: mission, impact, compatibility with our games (first one – Robbie the Robot) and expertise.

Mission

We are a mission first business, every decision we make is to further our mission – to entertain you, your family and friends with high-quality and fun apps & games that will keep challenging you and making sure you are laughing and discussing, all for social good – by raising money for charities.

When looking for charity partners we were aware that every charity has some sort of mission, but from our first partner, we wanted a mission that could deliver a direct positive impact on millions of people’s lives across the world. It was important for us not to just focus on helping those around us, but people globally.

We want to emphasize the importance of small charities as well, their impact and hard work are well appreciated, but for us, as a new mobile game business with big plans, it was important to try to impact as many lives as we can and this is possible through a partnership with a charity such as Sightsavers.

Sightsavers operates in more than 30 countries across Africa and Asia and they are regarded as a leader in their field and have won multiple international awards for their work.

Changing lives since 1950, their vision is simple, yet powerful – a world where no one is blind from avoidable causes, and people with disabilities participate equally in society.

This is the type of vision and mission we want to associate with as we start our journey. Our goal is to become a sustainable business and launch more apps and games that can help more charities in different sectors and of all sizes.

Impact

From a personal perspective, Sightsavers’ impact on the world is something that all charities are aiming for:

For us, these numbers are more than enough, and we aim to be a part of this.

Compatibility with our game – Robbie the Robot

This should be pretty obvious.

Sightsavers has a focus on digital innovations, having won in the “Digital Innovation” category in the Third Sector Awards 2020, for their Equal World campaign.  This is something our first mobile game absolutely delivers on. 

The game raises awareness of the challenges that blind and visually impaired people face every day, and the whole gameplay and story revolves around this challenge. The main character, Robbie, was struck by electricity which broke his visual processing unit. He has lost his confidence and is worried that his dream of being a famous pianist is over.   Players are invited to play along with him to help him regain his confidence to play on stage again.

We needed to associate ourselves, at least for the first game with a charity that tackles the same challenges.

Expertise

Running a charity is no easy thing, that is for sure.

There are a lot of processes and considerations from an operations point of view, negotiations with different governments and regulators and so much more. Sightsavers has the expertise across these areas, which means processes are set in place, there is an optimal flow to their operations and overall the impact of the donations from our community is more efficient. This is especially since they have a traditional focus on cost-effectiveness – winning five stars (the highest score available) with Impact Matters for cost-effectiveness.

More details below: https://www.sightsavers.org/news/2019/11/sightsavers-named-most-cost-effective-health-charity/ 

Which takes us back to the first point, impacting as many lives as we can, but at the same time as efficiently as possible.

Having all these reasons in mind, our goal here was simple, to find the one charity that ranks the highest for all these points.

And as we know already, the winner is Sightsavers.

Now, moving onto the next part, how our partnership works, which is really a simple process, based on two pillars: Finance and Awareness.

Finance

We support Sightsavers by donating half of our game revenue directly to them, to support their cause. It is a decision established at the top level of our company, to reinforce our mission and have a bigger, more meaningful impact on society. This means the bigger our company grows, the more people that play our game, the more money goes to charity. It is our way of giving back to the people around us and society in general.

On top of this, we built a donation system to allow people to donate directly to Sightsavers from our website. Since our community is a gaming one, most of the time spent by players will be in the game, so we realized it is more than necessary to have donations available in the game as well. The donation system inside the game follows the same route by redirecting players to our mobile-optimized website and Sightsavers for a secure transaction.

Awareness

As well as the financial side, we are looking to spread awareness of Sightsavers’ cause through our marketing channels. Regular campaigns are being carried across our social media to highlight to our community that – together is better.

The importance of communications and spreading awareness through our digital channels is as important as the financial side; they work hand-in-hand. Sometimes, we get way too busy with life, there is a lot going on and unintentionally, we tend to forget about the ones who are in need, the ones who are not as fortunate as us.

Although our marketing channels do not have a direct impact on people’s lives, they serve as a constant reminder to be more kind, more helpful and to HAVE as little as we can.

Never forget that less is enough and most of the time we have more than enough.

As a final note on this article, there is one very important thing we would like you all to bear in mind.  

Each one of us is affected by the Covid pandemic and each one of us has loved people to take care of, so this is one of the times we need to stand and act together to help where we can. Throughout our history, we discovered that standing together is the only way to overcome a crisis.

And as we already know, history tends to repeat itself.

Play the game today and help Robbie raise funds for people in need ?

News, updates and interesting gaming stuff on our social media ?