The Call of Duty Endowment exists to help veterans find meaningful employment. To drive awareness to their work, we created a gaming activation allowing Call of Duty players to unlock funds for veterans.

'Loot For Good’ was the first-ever charity extraction in-game challenge, giving CoD fans the opportunity to support veterans by turning a gaming trend - looting (collecting and extracting valuables to progress in the game) - into a playful direct way to raise funds for charity.

The campaign raised awareness of the Endowment’s mission by 10%, double our target, and the community raised $1,000,000 in four days.

Veterans have so much to give: leadership, skills, experience, grit. Yet many struggle to find fulfilling employment when they re-enter civilian life: 61% of U.S. veterans find themselves “underemployed”, working a job that underutilizes the education, experience and skills they attained in service.

For 14 years, the Call of Duty Endowment has been helping U.S. and U.K. veterans find high-quality employment after their military service and raising public awareness of the value they bring to the workplace.

In 2023, charitable giving in the U.S. is at its lowest in nearly three decades. Total charitable giving by both corporations, foundations, individuals, and bequests to support the work of nonprofits dropped double digits in the last year.

The Call of Duty Endowment is inspired to give back meaningfully to the real-life heroes that inspire the game Call of Duty. Its mission is to help U.S. veterans find high-quality employment after military service.

For Military Appreciation Month, the Endowment wanted to raise both awareness and funds by engaging the gaming community of the Call of Duty franchise with an in-game activation.

Call of Duty players could unlock up to $1m to help veterans find meaningful employment by doing what they do best: playing the game.

Our target audience was primarily Call of Duty gamers and secondarily the general public in the U.S. Our strategy was to gamify the experience of charitable giving and let players spread the word online to help us raise awareness to the Endowment.

Rather than guilt tripping and weighing heavily on our audiences, pulling on their heartstrings like most social good campaigns, we met our audience where they were and 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 behavior into an innovative way to donate money. Loot… for good.

In 2023, one of the most popular trends in the DMZ mode of Call of Duty was looting: collecting and extracting cash and other valuables to progress in the game. We decided to turn this trend into an innovative way to raise funds to help the Call of Duty Endowment place veterans into meaningful employment.

With “Loot for Good”, 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 at least $30,000 of in-game cash, Activision Blizzard allocated $1 as part of a $1 million total donation to the Endowment.

By gamifying the fundraising experience and tapping into the gaming community, our $1,000,000 donation was unlocked in only 4 days with more than 800,000 players participating in the challenge.

Launched for Military Appreciation Month, we announced the in-game activation using both in-game media, social media, influencers and celebrity veterans with an original song and video.

The in-game challenge of “Loot For Good” was implemented in the DMZ mode of Call of Duty from May 1st to May 7th.

The Endowment’s aimed to get 200,000 players to participate in the challenge. In the end, “Loot for Good” attracted 4 times as many with more than 800,000 players participating and 40 million matches played.

To gamify the experience even further, we created a leaderboard and tapped into players' competitiveness to get more participants. We also gave out custom in-game rewards for players to flex within the community and show they successfully completed the challenge and helped veterans.

Our communication efforts garnered 17M impressions total (KPI for this campaign was 1M) and got 136 stories in top news outlets including Forbes and IGN.

800,000 gamers participated in the Loot For Good challenge (4 times more than projected) and 40 million matches were players.

The Call of Duty community unlocked the maximum donation in record time, raising $1,000,000 in only four days, hitting the target with three days to spare.

Ultimately, we increased awareness of the Endowment by 10% (KPI for this campaign was 5%).

Most importantly, the players who Looted for Good helped over 1,600 veterans find high-quality employment in real life.

Instead of taking the easy route by inserting a pop-up donation request in the game and treating CoD solely as owned media, we chose to go deep and make the act of donation experiential.

Despite the added complexity of changing the code of a game mode without affecting the gameplay experience, this approach was superior as it worked to play into all the real motivations and excitement that draws players to the game to begin with. That core piece of channel innovation informed the whole campaign, rooting everything in what excited the players. No selling, only playing, and learning what the Endowment did.