Safer Gambling Week is a yearly initiative originated in the United Kingdom that aims to raise awareness of safer and more responsible gambling. Casino Guru, staying true to their values and going further than expected in efforts to improve player safety, has created a unique campaign that promoted safer and responsible gambling messages across their English website over the course of the Safer Gambling Week 2021, from Nov 1 to Nov 7.

The team worked with the premise that responsible gambling messages need to be interesting and distinctive to capture the users’ attention and truly get the message across. That is why they crafted a unique campaign aiming to increase awareness of gambling addiction and responsible gambling and motivate players to take action if needed.

“Despite our efforts to create well-researched and truly helpful educational responsible gambling content, only a small percentage of our visitors searches for it and reads it. Unfortunately, players often start looking for this type of content only after noticing the first signs of problem gambling. The majority of players gamble responsibly, and it is crucial to reinforce their good habits and promote preventive steps that minimize the chance of becoming problem gamblers later on,” explains Šimon Vincze, Responsible Gambling Projects Lead at Casino Guru.

In line with this approach, Casino Guru’s creative team has designed and implemented three different responsible gambling messages – “It’s Safer Gambling Week 2021”, “Thank you for caring”, and “Responsible players do not lose” – each designed with a different deliberate idea in mind, to allow the team to test and measure what kind of messaging works best. Each version linked to a different responsible gambling article that complemented and built upon the original message.

These messages appeared at prominent locations across the website to make them as visible as possible. The detailed version of the message was displayed as a widget in the website’s list of best casinos. It was designed to resemble the cards presenting information about individual casinos to minimize ‘banner blindness,’ as people are used to overlooking ads and other elements that look like ads. The simpler and shorter version of the message was displayed at the top of each page, in a bright orange widget to visually stand out and go in line with Safer Gambling Week’s colour scheme.

Overall, 2.31% of the users who saw one of the three messages clicked it to read more. This percentage was the highest for the ‘Responsible players do not lose’ message at 2.54%, followed by ‘Thank you for caring’ at 2.35% and ‘It’s Safer Gambling Week 2021’ at 2.05%. The team has not measured any significant differences in metrics measured in different genders and age groups.

Vincze comments on the findings: “In terms of the number of visitors who clicked the message, the ‘Responsible players do not lose’ version yielded the best results. However, it had the lowest percentage of users that spent at least 60 seconds browsing the linked article. This was in line with our expectations, as this version was a bit of a clickbait, although one with good intentions. On the other hand, the ‘It’s Safer Gambling Week 2021’ version, in which the messaging was most informative and least captivating, yielded the least clicks but the highest percentage of users who then spent at least 60 seconds on the article.”

The individual articles linked from the three messages contained links to other, more encyclopaedical responsible gambling content, such as a list of problem gambling help centres, articles about gambling addiction and overcoming it, safer and responsible gambling, and more. The list of problem gambling help centres garnered the most attention, although this was likely influenced by a link to it placed at the top of each of the three articles.

Vincze adds: “When it comes to helping players and making a positive impact, numbers and metrics are not the only things that matter. Even if our campaign helped only one player stay safer while gambling or look for help, we can call it a success, regardless of the overall statistics we measured.”

He continues by putting the campaign into a broader context: “In comparison to our normal educational articles about problem and responsible gambling, our Safer Gambling Week campaign has been seen by a relatively big number of visitors. To make sure we maximize our positive impact all year round, we plan to use our findings to create an effective long-term campaign, which will be part of our future efforts aimed at educating and informing players and the public about gambling and its dangers. There is much to look forward to!”