In the United States, 61% of veterans returning home are underemployed and unemployed . That's why Call of Duty Endowment, a nonprofit organization supported by Activision Blizzard, has dedicated itself to finding these veterans high-quality jobs. In 2022, they reached the milestone of 100,000 veterans who had benefited from this program and wanted to use the opportunity to commemorate the achievement.

However, most people have never heard of the Endowment, let alone the 100K veterans they've helped.

So, our job was to celebrate the latest milestone and make the program famous while raising more money to help the next 100K veterans find high-quality employment.

Helping veterans shouldn't be a task solely assigned to a certain group or demographic, so we needed an idea simple enough to travel beyond the gaming community while keeping it entertaining for the core audience of gamers.

We decided to use a tactic that many non-profit organizations already use to raise funds - host a charity race. But instead of our race taking place on a track in real life, it happened inside our game, Call of Duty - the best-selling video game franchise.

For the first time ever, we asked Call of Duty players to "drop the gun and go for a run" for our veterans. In doing so, Call of Duty Veteruns 100K became the first-ever charity race held inside a video game.

Because of the simplicity of the mechanics and it being inherently inside the game, we made Call of Duty Veteruns 100K travel beyond the gaming scene and garner participation from people all over the world, making the conversation around veterans and the Endowment go global.

The journey for charity is long, complicated and has a limited reach. That’s when we realized the Call of Duty video game had the potential to be Endowment’s biggest platform to share what Endowment is with the world and have a broader reach and strong amplification.

The formula unveiled in front of our eyes: Leverage the game’s popularity and number of players to take Endowment from zero to fame.

Our approach? A gamer community-first approach to a classic fundraising formula. A space where the current Call of Duty community saw how their own movements transformed into real life donations and where they could share in real time the impact they’ve made while playing just like any other day.

To celebrate placing 100,000 veterans into high-quality jobs, we launched the first-ever in-game charity run called Call of Duty Veteruns 100K. To encourage participation, we employed the following engagement tactics.

Customized Twitter Reports: Partnered with Twitter so players could request customized reports that showed how far they ran in-game and how much Call of Duty donated on their behalf.

Myth-busting: We realized there was misinformation about veterans on Twitter. So, we developed a “myth-busting” tweet series between Call of Duty and the Endowment brand accounts to raise awareness about veteran employment.

In-game Challenge: Activation to award in-game items for each distance completed: a gold calling card for 100km, silver for 50km, or bronze for 25km.

Leaderboard: Launched the Call of Duty Veteruns 100K microsite, featuring a donation thermometer, leaderboard, and other key live data about the campaign.

Call of Duty Donation: Allocated $1 for every 10 virtual kilometers ran in-game.

Call of Duty made history with Call of Duty Veteruns 100K, a first-of-its-kind in-game charity race. More than 8M unique players participated in the charity run, running a total of 226.7 million kilometers. These players were highly engaged: 3.1M users earned a bronze, silver, or gold medal by running 25 kilometers or more.

In comparing the Call of Duty Endowment’s social media performance from the entire 2021 calendar year to the nine-day Veteruns campaign, Call of Duty Veteruns accounted for nearly 50% of the total impressions, engagements, and video views.

But most importantly, the campaign raised over $1,000,000 USD to help fund the placement of the next 100K veterans into high-quality jobs.