The Call of Duty Endowment was founded to give back to the real-life heroes that inspire the game Call of Duty, with a mission to help U.S. veterans find high-quality employment after military service.

To celebrate Military Appreciation Month 2023, they wanted to engage players to be more intimately involved with the act of donating, and the cause. With so many veteran’s causes out there, it's challenging for any one to be well-known. We needed the Endowment to stand out.

Our task involved crafting a creative campaign but also designing an in-game activation. The pressure was on, as Activision set a time limit for the activation: only one week to hit the target to unlock the maximum funds of $1M for the Endowment.

Here were our mission objectives:

1. Raise awareness of the Endowment’s Mission

2. Drive engagement amongst COD Community

The Call of Duty Endowment launched “Loot For Good’, the first charity extraction challenge within the popular DMZ mode in Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0. We changed the code of an entire game mode to give the opportunity to gamers to turn the virtual cash they looted into real donations to the charity.

For each match played inside DMZ where players looted enough in-game cash, Activision Blizzard allocated $1 as part of a $1 million total donation to the Endowment.

But the challenge would only last May 1st to 7th so we needed the campaign to jump-start the community.

We already had the formula: competition, teamwork, community, the rush. And we built that into every part of the campaign. We tapped into COD streamers for community, created a microsite for competition and trailer for content, and more to get players doing what they do best: playing the game.

Our target audience was Call of Duty players. They focus on their game to the exclusion of everything else. So rather than guilt tripping like most social good campaigns, we needed to play to gamers' motivations, making our goal and their mission the same. We had to shift how we thought of the game – not as a broadcast channel, but an experiential channel. We wanted to go deep and root everything in what excited the players, including the donation mechanic.

So, we set out to design an in-game challenge and communication that made learning about and backing the Endowment’s mission just as electrifying as playing the game itself.

We focused on CoD’s hottest gaming mode, called DMZ where players squad up and run against the clock to collect loot and extract it together, and turned this integral in-game behavior into an innovative way to donate money. Loot… for good

The Loot For Good challenge would only last May 1st to 7th so we needed the campaign to jump-start the community.

We made the campaign compelling in all the same ways that players loved the game and met them where they are.

We announced the in-game activation using both in-game media, social media, and gaming influencers. We also partnered with the War Hippies – two U.S. combat veterans and country musicians – to create a music video of their rewritten hit single, “The Hangman” that directly spoke to the challenge and Endowment’s mission.

To stoke this competition and drive engagement, we created a microsite landing page with a leader board where players could check their progress. We also gave out custom in-game rewards for players to flex within the community, showing they successfully completed the challenge and helped veterans.

Mission Accomplished.

Loot for Good was the first-ever charity extraction challenge in Call of Duty and the most successful in-game challenge for the franchise to date.

We bet on upbeat excitement over downer sympathy, and it paid off.

We grew awareness of the Endowment’s mission:

Result 1: Increased by 10%…doubling our target
 (KPI: 5%)

Result 2: 17M impressions total (KPI: 1M impressions)

Result 3: Over 136 stories in top news outlets

We engaged the COD community:

Result 1: 800,000 gamers participated in Loot For Good, overachieving on our target 4x (KPI: 200,000 players). 


Ultimately, we enabled the COD community to unlock the maximum donation in record time, raising $1,000,000 in only four days.

Most importantly, we did right by vets: the players who Looted for Good helped over 1,600 veterans find high-quality employment in real life.