Serge Ibaka, the face of our NBA General Manager game during the 2014-2015 season has become so much more than just our collaborator.
The ‘Serge Ibaka Foundation’ is carrying out a magnificent job with the children of the Congo, the NBA stars’ birth place, working to better their education, health and nutrition.
We proposed to collaborate at the premier ‘Son of the Congo’ event with this foundation at the beginning of June, a documentary about the life of Serge which was filmed for charity.
In From the Bench it sounded like a great idea and we started to work on the possibility. After some consideration we decided to not only participate and be present at the opening event as collaborators, but the idea to use the game as a tool to raise funds for the Serge Ibaka Foundation also arose.
For this we started a virtual charity tournament within our NBA General Manager game where the prize would be a donated pair of signed sneakers from Ibaka himself, allowing a charity to donate such profits to the ‘Serge Ibaka Foundation’. We also created many in-game activities in order for the user to become better acquainted with the charity and how to collaborate with it.
Developers, designers and in fact every member of From The Bench got to work. The time to launch the game before the release of the documentary was not on our side meaning the dedication of the whole team was necessary. But in the end it was worth it.
The result was a tremendous reception by our users insomuch as our daily user participation index doubled in tournament entries to 10,000 a day.
With this post we’d like to thank all the parties that made this possible. Serge Ibaka and his charity, the From The Bench team and our game users. Together, showing great generosity they made NBA General Manager into ‘The solidarity app’
