Who knew you could help solve the puzzle of poverty while playing a puzzle game on your smartphone?
ZiMAD, the creators of the Magic Jigsaw Puzzles game app, had an inkling in late 2015 that it could happen. Leaders at ZiMAD saw in a survey that many of their 25 million users had expressed interest in supporting organizations helping children around the world—so they decided to launch a charity campaign of their own. “As a socially oriented company, we wanted to provide our users with [the] opportunity to contribute and support [a] program that really matters to them,” says Maria Neumiarzhytskaia, PR manager for ZiMAD. The San Francisco-based company launched a partnership with World Vision in May 2016. ZiMAD pledged a portion of its puzzle income from that month to World Vision, promoting the partnership on social media and directly through the game interface. In June, they created three special puzzle packs and donated a percentage of the proceeds from those sales to World Vision.
Since 2016, the effort has raised just under $255,000 for World Vision’s education, water, child protection, mother and child health, and emergency relief efforts.
Maria says they plan to continue as long as the campaign keeps producing positive results and engaging users. “We chose World Vision as a partner because of our players’ high loyalty to this organization and its high rating at Charity Watch,” she says. Maria also says ZiMAD’s employees and fans seem to be united in their support for weaving philanthropy into the game experience. About 80 percent of Magic Jigsaw Puzzles users live in the United States, but the game is also popular in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, China, Russia, Australia, and New Zealand. “We want to make charity an important part of [the] Magic Jigsaw Puzzles game and gradually connect other products,” Maria says. “Being a digital puzzle game [developer], we want to use the power of modern technologies to spread the word and help people.”
For more information, visit ZIMAD’s website.