Palringo uses its social gaming community to raise nearly $1M for charity

Palringo, the social platform to find games and people to play them with, has raised nearly $1 million for charity over the last 4 years by tapping into its strong social gaming community.

This year the app launched Hero Squad, earning nearly half a million dollars over just 4 weeks by introducing limited edition, in-game charity missions that players had to complete in order to earn a special one-off Achievement. In-game purchases could be made to increase the chances of completing bigger and more dangerous missions and 50% of the proceeds were donated to Action Against Hunger and Islamic Relief Worldwide to help fund food aid projects.

The UK-based app creates multiplayer games that can be played in chat groups of up to 2000 people. The combination of chat and gaming, the two biggest categories of mobile engagement, helped Palringo to become one of the fastest growing UK tech companies last year, with chat games contributing nearly 50% to their revenues, mainly through in-game purchases. The unique community dynamic adds a key dimension to gaming and it’s this social aspect that has helped to grow the charity campaign year on year.

Palringo initially created the campaign in 2013 as a way to offer their large Arabic audience a tool to enhance their charitable activity during Ramadan. By adding a charitable twist to their games, it allowed their users to continue what they were doing day to day, but with the added bonus of contributing to worthy causes at a time when charitable giving is a priority for them.

But it’s the community aspect of Palringo that helped the campaign to spread beyond the app’s Arabic community with nearly a third of players based in other parts of the world. Gifting is a huge part of the Palringo experience and their games give the option to gift ‘boosters’ to everyone playing in the group. The combination of this gifting dynamic and the social environment helps to spread the message. 

“The more people in the group that are playing, the better the experience is for everyone, including the spender, which spreads the goodwill of the campaign, encourages more people to get involved and ultimately raises more cash for charity! It’s win-win for the players and the charities,” says Tim Rea, CEO of Palringo. 

“It’s also a nice confirmation that the revenue from gifting contributes the most to the charity total, proving that a social gaming environment is a successful way to engage people with charitable giving.” 

The results have shown that in-game spending can increase by as much as 33% during these type of campaigns, with spending by one individual reaching $14,000! This year the app saw the average size of donation increase by 28% to $63.74. 

The company chose Action Against Hunger and Islamic Relief as their charity partners as they wanted to support food aid projects to tie into the origins of the activity as a Ramadan campaign, where fasting is key component of the religious period.  

How engaging our Muslim users has helped us raise almost $1 million for charity

For many of us, especially in the UK, June and July might be spent looking to the sky trying to find that ball of fire known as ‘the sun’, but for others they look to see when they can spot the new moon signifying the arrival of Eid and the celebrations that come with it. This time of year also marks the end of Palringo’s charity season, and it’s no coincidence that it overlaps with Eid.

Since 2002 Palringo has been running an annual charity campaign and what started out as a small, focused campaign aimed at a specific set of our users, has morphed into a global initiative across all of our users helping to raise nearly $1million* for charity.

So, why did we, a UK-based chat app, decide that Ramadan was a key moment to engage with our users?

Well, Palringo has a significant audience based in the Middle East due to a regional roll-out strategy which focused on understanding the cultural behaviour and creating localised content for this social, tech-savvy and mobile-first audience. With Ramadan a key event to consider we wanted to understand the impact this important religious festival had on our users. For many non-Muslims, fasting during Ramadan is probably the most well-known pillar of Islam and charitable giving, also a huge part of the holy month, is less focused on.

According to Google data, MENA users access content on their mobile devices more frequently during Ramadan than any other time as they have significantly more free time on their hands. We saw this as an opportunity to offer a way to enhance charitable giving by letting them continue to do what they were doing day to day anyway and adding a charitable twist to our games.

Palringo is a social platform for finding games and people to play them with and we create chat-based games that can be played directly in a group chat of up to 2000 people. It’s a unique combination that leverages the fact that chat and gaming are the two biggest categories of mobile engagement. These chat-based games have come to represent nearly 50% of Palringo’s revenue, mainly through in-game purchases, and so it was a no-brainer that we could use this medium as a way to raise lots of cash for charity.

Our campaigns focus on introducing a limited edition aspect to a game whereby users have to collect special charity items. If they succeed in collecting all of them they will earn a special charity achievement, which helps to increase their overall ‘Reputation’ in the app - hot currency within Palringo!  In-game boosters help to increase the chance of collecting all the items, and users can choose to help the whole chat group or just themselves.

Gifting is a huge part of the Palringo experience, especially from our Arabic users. Users can gift each other virtual items and in-gameboosters and it’s actually this part that contributes the most to the charity campaign e.g. a user will pay to increase the chances of everyone in their group to collect a certain item for a limited time period. The more people that are involved and having fun, the better the experience is for everyone, including the spender.

The social environment and competitiveness of the games, along with the gifting nature of Arabic users, is what has helped grow the Ramadan campaign beyond this targeted user group. The combination of group chat and gaming creates a unique community dynamic making it a great way to increase charitable giving and spread the goodwill to others by encouraging others to compete and get involved. While not everyone who plays necessarily spends money, it’s the involvement of people playing that encourages the spenders to spend more, and thus raise more money for charity! Win-win!

The results speak for themselves. In-game spending has shown to increase by 33% during the campaign period, with some players contributing up to $14,000 proving that charitable giving in a social, gamified environment encourages others to get involved.

This year we used the charity campaign to launch a brand new game; Hero Squad. Revenues from the game reached almost half a million dollars in its first month with 50% of this going straight to our charity partners, which this year were Islamic Relief and Action Against Hunger.

Over the past 4 years of running the campaign Palringo users have raised nearly $1 million for different charities. In the past we have partnered with Child’s Play, and Charity Right and have a continuing relationship with Islamic Relief and Action Against Hunger. As fasting is a major part of Ramadan we have been keen to work with charities that carry out food aid projects to help keep the ties to the origins of the campaign.

The value of the Palringo community and the opportunities it brings to a gaming environment  is quite unique. The communication between our users is really the essence of the whole charitable drive and we’ve been blown away by the continuing generosity of our users over the years.