Building from the ground up: how the Gamesys Foundation is at the forefront of the new social responsibility drive by operators

As the 2020 crowned EGR Operator of the Year, Gamesys Group’s strong company footprint and track record for leading the industry is well known, particularly in terms of responsible gambling and consumer interaction, both of which have brought the firm many accolades over the year.

However, what is less well known is the group’s charitable work which has come to prominence through the Gamesys Foundation, a not-for-profit charity which aims to aid individuals and charities dealing with mental health issues. Launching in early 2020, the foundation has donated more than £2.5m to charities across the UK and is set to increase that charitable effort throughout 2021, particularly given the mental health implications of the Covid-19 pandemic.

EGR Compliance caught up with Gamesys Group’s chairman and trustee of the Gamesys Foundation, Neil Goulden, to assess the social responsibility-based foundation’s performance over the last 12 months and how charity operations are linking  the wider Gamesys Group.

EGR Compliance: It’s been a year since the Gamesys Foundation began, what’s been the biggest success for you in that time?

Neil Goulden (NG): For me, I think the biggest success was getting the foundation up and running. It was a big commitment from Gamesys Group. We found some independent trustees and we agreed a funding regime with the company for the first 15 months that they would put in £150,000 a month, which is a big commitment. That started in October 2019 and took us through to the end of 2020, and then they chose to continue that commitment. So far, Gamesys has donated about £2.5m and I think that’s been the biggest achievement, setting it up and getting the funding in place.

We’ve committed a significant chunk of that money, not all of it, but a significant chunk, £1.9m will have been committed until 2022 to mental health charities or to charities doing mental health work. For example, with Sue Ryder, we gave them £100,000 to get their bereavement online support system up and running. We gave £100,000 to Family Action which deals with mental health problems within families, and we gave £100,000 to the British Red Cross as part of their project examining loneliness. Perhaps the biggest pledge is to Women’s Aid, £624,000 over three years plus a £200,000 initial donation, also a further commitment to their Chat Line over the next two years, which results in us donating over £1m to Women’s Aid.

Women’s Aid is there to help women and children deal with the effects of domestic violence. There are some horrible stats that say close on three women a week are killed in their own homes by men and the lockdown hasn’t helped. There’s been a big increase in violence towards women during the pandemic, obviously as families are stuck at home due to lockdown measures. Women’s Aid doesn’t just deal with violence in the home, they provide counselling support to women affected by all violence perpetrated by men they know.

Women’s Aid is launching a campaign to improve the mental health of survivors they have managed to get out of violence through the volunteer line and helping them to find refuge. There are long-term effects of violence and what we’re trying to do is help those survivors with their mental health issues. It’s a campaign that we believe very strongly in, especially given Covid. As a company, Gamesys, in conjunction with our foundation, decided to stop advertising, through our sponsorships on TV and we donated that to Women’s Aid and recorded a promotional video for them which aired during lockdown. The campaign signposted people to where they could get help if they were suffering abuse and then we funded that solution.

Gamesys Foundation executive chair Neil Goulden

EGR Compliance: The Covid pandemic has affected every facet of modern life. How much has it challenged the foundation’s objectives, particularly around things like helping mental health charities?

NG: We certainly had a lot more applications, it’s no secret that in respect of mental health of a lot of people have suffered through the lockdown for various reasons. Some could be experiencing abusive relationships, and some because children are struggling, being at home and not being able to see their friends and go to school, so there’s a whole host of mental health issues developing due to Covid. We knew nothing about Covid when we set up the foundation, we just decided that mental health was a growing problem in society and something we wanted to address with the charity. Yes, we’ve had more applications and the issue of mental health has become more relevant during the pandemic but it hasn’t changed our objectives.

EGR Compliance: Gamesys is becoming known in the industry for things like increased safer gambling interactions and its stance on responsible gambling measures, which have come to prominence during the pandemic, how have these policies been influenced by the work of the foundation?

NG: For me, it’s Gamesys’ work that influences what the foundation does, not the other way around. As an example, there’s a lot of awareness among our staff of what we’re doing with respect to mental health and they’ve been encouraged to get involved and bring recommendations to us, help us with our work and indeed some of them are acting as volunteers. With things like Women’s Aid, it has raised awareness among our staff towards being good citizens.

What we have done within Gamesys at the same time as we formed the foundation was to pull together all our CSR work, and give it the more relevant title of ESG (environmental, social and governance). We formed an ESG committee where there are several executive directors involved. Lee Fenton [Gamesys CEO] sits on the ESG, I sit on the ESG and two of our other non-execs sit on it with one as chair and the non-executive directors acting effectively as lead on ESG matters.

We’ve done a lot of work in ESG. As a group, we have signed up to the UN Global Compact which has 10 principles centred around human rights. The Carbon Trust has given us carbon neutral status. ISS, one of the major institution’s proxy holders that look at companies, has given us a Prime rating and Bloomberg recently rated as number one for ESG in the gaming sector. We know we’re doing the right things and the foundation is a big part of that, but only one part especially given our work on the ESG committee. The three non-execs which sit on the ESG (myself, Andria and Katie) are also three of the five trustees of the foundation as well so it’s very integrated into our ESG work.

EGR Compliance: Last year Gamesys was awarded operator of the year at the EGR Operator Awards. In your opinion, does this success vindicate the benefits of a more sustainable approach to both players and sustainability in general?

NG: We are very proud of the operator of the year award, the employer of the year award and highly commended in the responsible gambling category. Those three accolades meant a lot to us. I have always had a saying that people consume products and they buy brands, and it’s important to us that our brands are seen in the right way. More than 90% of our staff are highly satisfied with how we have worked with them during the Covid-19 pandemic in making sure they’re working well from home, they’re safe and they’re looked after. We have increased our regular customer interactions by more than 70% and that’s what our brand stands for. People are at the centre of everything Gamesys does so staff wellbeing and being positive in our approach is important to us. We have been financially successful and every employee in the group has received shares in the company as a bonus. Our customers are very loyal to our brands and that is all linked into the work that the foundation does. Members of staff are appreciative of the work we do with the foundation; they want to get involved with it and they respect the work we are doing with it. Our customers love it, particularly what we are doing in respect of Women’s Aid. We have a strong female customer base and they love what we are doing so it’s all part of this positivity. The work that we are doing at the foundation, how we interact with our staff, and our customers and what our brands do are all interlinked so we’re naturally delighted to be recognised for our efforts.

EGR Compliance: Do you have any information on what Gamesys employees in general think of the work of the foundation?

NG: They are very, very supportive of it and several of the things that we do were either introduced by employees of the company or something they’re associated with. For example, our team down in Malta highlighted a charity called Victim Support Malta which supports issues around suicide. The Maltese government funded it and dropped the funding because of the pressures of Covid and we were asked to provide the funding to get the charity through the pandemic. We ended up providing £37,000 in funding for that. Our customer service team in Stoke identified the Alice charity, which is effectively a food bank helping the homeless and they wanted to develop their mental health strategy going forward so we said we would give them £20,000 a year for the next three years.

We supported the Movember campaign in November with many of our staff members sporting moustaches during the month, matching donations made to the charity. In Gibraltar, we supported Clubhouse Gibraltar, a safe place for people who have mental health issues to reintegrate back into working life by putting £30,000 into that. On top of that, we have a campaign running now for our staff called Smiles where we have allocated £100,000 of the foundation’s money and said ‘look, if you’ve got a local cause that you think is worth a donation let us know and we can help’. We have put £100,000 aside and said the maximum you can get is £2,000. Based on this we could fund up to 50 small projects, be it a local football club that is running out of money or a hockey club that deals with kids with autism and other mental health issues. So, we have made that available. Lots of our staff are applying for £2,000 grants and not just in London but also in Stoke, Malta, the US, Manila and Gibraltar.

EGR Compliance: What are your plans for the remainder of 2021 and the foundation’s objectives going forward?

NG: The objectives of the foundation going forward do not change. We are here to alleviate the harm of mental health issues, in its widest context, and we are not limiting ourselves in any way.  The latest charity we have been involved with is called Missing People, which helps people dealing with loved ones who have gone missing. It is a really great charity. We’re also going to continue our work with Women’s Aid and we’ll take on other applications that come in, for example, we have just given a small grant to the Royal Marines to help with the impact of PTSD on soldiers returning from war zones, etc.