WLA launches successful Responsible Gaming webinar week

Opening the event, WLA President Rebecca Paul emphasized that Responsible Gaming is a top priority and essential part of lottery CSR activities, which ensures player safety and instills confidence in the industry. The importance of this topic was the motivation for launching this new annual event.

The WLA Responsible Gaming program has greatly evolved over the past decade, enhancing the tools it provides. Currently 78% of WLA membership is certified level 2 or higher, across the WLA five global regions. Each year, lotteries continue to initiate and advance their certification to the WLA RG program which has four levels.

Speakers from the lottery and other groups covered one theme per day as explained below.

Theme: Running lottery holiday campaigns with attention to minors

Dr Jeffrey Deverensky, Professor Emeritus with the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-Risk Behaviors at McGill University in Montreal, Canada discussed the Gift Responsibly Campaign, which is a collaborative initiative between McGill University’s International Centre for Youth Gambling and the National Council on Problem Gambling (Washington).  

Studies undertaken by Deverensky showed that the earlier people participate or are exposed to gambling, the more likely they are to develop a gambling problem later in life. Although under aged people are prohibited from regulated forms of gambling in most jurisdictions, international research suggests they are engaged in different forms of gambling.

The Gift Responsibly Campaign aims to raise awareness of youth gambling, educate parents and communities on potential dangers of buying lottery tickets for underage children, and support RG practices, while remaining neutral about legalized gambling. Over 50 WLA lottery members already participate in this program.  

Several lotteries presented their RG programs with respect to raising awareness of underage gambling, and their participation in the holiday Gift Responsibly Campaign.  

Accessible online training for retail employees

Loto Québec has developed online training for retail employees, which is available via lottery terminals and the web. Offering easily accessible more frequent training is particularly interesting, given that in recent years, there has been a high turnover of retail workers.  

Broadening communications campaigns

The Hoosier Lottery noted that when educating the public about underage gambling, it had continued to expand its campaigns from the initial logo and message, to cover billboard advertisements, radio ads, TV commercials, draw station interviews with its Executive Director, Sarah Taylor, as well as digital media campaigns across the web, social, and its app.

Increase lottery participation worldwide in the Gift Responsibly campaign.  

The Austrian Lotteries underscored the need to raise awareness that adults buying lotto products must not gift them to minors. It noted that increased lottery participation in Europe would help to raise a greater societal awareness, that lottery customers who may be parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents must think twice about the intended recipient of their gift.

It was also underlined that the campaign could be applied beyond the holidays, because minors could receive lottery product gifts on different occasions throughout the year.  

Theme: Demystifying and assessing priority groups

This session looked at specific priority groups and what work is being done by some lotteries and other groups provide them with improved support.

Vulnerable communities in New Zealand

The audience heard how Lotto New Zealand and Dioscuri – a consultancy agency dedicated to working within indigenous and vulnerable communities to develop stronger and sustainable futures for them – developed a successful partnership that has worked to better comprehend the challenges faced by vulnerable or so-called priority groups.  

Dioscuri co-owner and managing director Jeremy Logan explained the importance of understanding how communities think and function, and to consider broader aspects that can affect them, including socio-economic and cultural.  

By bringing the lotto and community together, with diverse stakeholder participation, including people from priority groups, the feedback received enabled Lotto New Zealand to improve the effectiveness of its awareness raising campaigns.  

US veterans

Presentations from Shane W. Kraus, Ph.D. at the Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Joshua Grubbs, Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico, Center on Alcohol, Substance use, and Addictions, shone a light on the priority group of US veterans.  

A key takeaway from their work was that lottery play is a common form of problem gambling in veterans receiving treatment for gambling disorder, and it is associated with specific clinical problems. Additionally, research shows US veterans have higher rates of gambling disorder compared to the civilian population, which was also the case in Australian and the UK studies.

Theme: the importance of RG must in game design  

Anne Pattberg, one of three CSR/RG international expert members of the Independent Assessment Panel, which reviews all applications for WLA RG Framework levels 2-4 and forwards its certification recommendations to WLA, shared insights on the importance of RG in game design.

Firstly, it ensures that game developers are aware of issues from the outset, and can design attractive and responsible products. It also feeds into the planning of marketing activities, and provides information that could be significant when discussing the launch of new games with regulators.

Additionally, the use of tools to evaluate factors, such as the event frequency, sales channels, game mechanisms, and jackpot size, to identify a game’s attractiveness to vulnerable groups, enables developers to adjust the game as required, depending on the evaluation results.