Foundation That Helps Sick Children Turns to Video Game to Raise Money and Attention

The Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation, a Los Angeles nonprofit group that helps sick

children, has long relied on computer games to help entertain the young patients it serves. But now the charity is using video games to reach out to a different group — donors.

Patricia Evans, vice president of development, got the idea for an online game last year when she was searching for an alternative to the golf tournaments and other fund-raising events that her charity typically organizes.

Recognizing that more people were turning to the Internet for their entertainment, she thought she would give people a chance to contribute, she says, “wherever they are, whenever they can, as long as they have Internet access.”

In late November, the charity released the downloadable game, called “The Tuttles Madcap Misadventures: Starlight Charity Challenge.” The charity’s officials expect it will raise at least $160,000 from initial online sales, after expenses.

In an agreement with Legacy Interactive, a gaming company that helped Starlight create the game, the charity will receive $15 of the $19.99 purchase price of the game each time it is downloaded.

Available on Legacy Interactive’s Web site, the adventure game follows a family on a disaster-ridden trip to the Alamo. After the family’s minivan plunges into the ocean, players must help the game’s characters contend with sharks and jellyfish. Stranded in the desert, players guide the family members among cacti and scorpions, with the goal of arriving in time for a re-enactment of the battle of the Alamo. People can also download the game from gaming portals such as Yahoo Games and Big Fish Games.

The charity is working with the public-relations executives at Legacy and at Animax Entertainment, which helped create the script and characters, to promote the game. They have distributed video news releases to 10 metropolitan areas, reached out to gaming-industry publications, and posted a snippet from the game on YouTube. The two companies are sharing the cost of promotions, an estimated $43,000 to date, with the charity. Starlight has contributed about $8,000 of that total.

Ms. Evans says that she was able to sell other staff members on the idea because there was strong marketing data to back it up. More than 85 million people play video games that can be obtained online, according to gaming-industry organizations. Meanwhile, the fastest-growing group of players is women over 40, a group on which Starlight relies heavily for the approximately $20-million in donations it receives each year.

The game took considerable time and resources to create, says Ms. Evans, who approached both companies with the idea. Animax Entertainment had worked with the charity on past projects, and Ariella Lehrer, president of Legacy Interactive, had volunteered with children’s hospitals and understood the charity’s mission.

The Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation paid $200,000 for the game, most of which went toward script writing, character design, and creating the computer program behind the game. That figure was less than half the amount that gaming companies typically spend, because Legacy and Animax provided their services at significantly reduced costs. Celebrity supporters of the charity, such as Jamie Lee Curtis, Bob Saget, and William Shatner donated their time to voice the game’s characters, and SomaTone Interactive Audio donated background music.

The charity was closely involved in each step of the game’s production, says Ms. Evans. Charity staff members reviewed the script and the illustrations to make sure they were in keeping with the organization’s mission of helping ill children.

Now that the game is available online, Ms. Evans is looking for other ways it can be used to raise money. For example, the charity may develop sequels to “The Tuttles Madcap Misadventures,” which would cost far less money than the original. And Legacy is now negotiating with retail outlets that are expected to offer the game in their stores, beginning in January.