Annual Report: 2022 – 2023

Happy 2024, gamers! We hope the year is off to a wonderful start for you and your fellow players.

Our team is full speed ahead activating plans made for the new year. Before we ramp up, we’d like to reflect on some milestones since our last annual report.

Your contributions, time, and advocacy have helped create thousands of inspirational, joy-filled moments for hospitalized families. Let’s talk about some recent achievements!

In this report, we’ll take a look at our 2022 financials, which recently became available for public inspection via our latest Form 990. As well, we’ll reflect on some of the big moments from 2023, many of which were made possible thanks to funds raised during 2022. Perhaps most notably: a significant portion of funds raised towards the end of 2022 influenced the construction of GO Kart 3.0, which we’ve detailed in various blogs throughout the past year.

As we look ahead in 2024: since launching GO Kart 3.0, we’ve received over 600 requests from partner hospitals asking for units. Providing this many GO Karts across each hospital represents a $2.1 million fundraising goal. Our primary objective this year is to meet each of those requests. Doing so will enable as many 1.3 million gaming experiences for hospitalized families annually. Together, we can make it happen!

Introduction

At the core of our organization is a spirit of play. A desire to play instigated our founding – and our belief in the importance of play has informed our continued work.

Play is an integral part of our lives starting from early moments in childhood. It’s through play we socialize, learn, and make sense of the world. High-quality play makes for a high-quality life.

Play is especially important for kids as they mature. Play enhances learning, builds problem-solving skills, is a form of self expression, fosters creativity, expands vocabulary, and most importantly… is fun!

But in hospitals, making play readily available is challenging.

Physical space is limited, staff must focus on treatment, and financial resources are often needed elsewhere.

Each year, millions of children and their families receive medical care inside hospitals. For many, the process can be scary and isolating. During hospitalization, kids lose access to friends, school, and moments that typically define childhood.

We’re on a mission to change their experience.

Our team at Gamers Outreach works to restore a sense of joy and normalcy in the lives of hospitalized children. We believe the world is better when kids can play, and gamers have the power to help.

Video games, when manageable inside hospitals, make play accessible at scale. Games are enjoyed by all age groups, and they offer a range of activities.

Our goal is to ensure all hospitalized kids have access to play – and we’ve chosen video games as our tools of choice. We are here to improve the patient experience.

Our Vision, Mission, & Core Beliefs

One day we want to look back and ask: “remember when hospitals didn’t have video games?” That’s the future we’re committed to building.

The great news is: that future is tangible. We know how to make play scalable – through technology!

The challenge: there are thousands of healthcare facilities around the world. We’re taking on a big problem. There’s a lot of work to reach full adoption.

Since our founding in 2007, we’ve worked to inspire and heal kids through play. Five tenets guide this sense of purpose and have remained unchanged:

• We are gamers.
  We are video game enthusiasts on a mission to help our fellow gamers in hospitals. We are stewards of an organization that serves as a source of relief for hospital patients, and a conduit for video game enthusiasts to give back through their passion. We have dedicated ourselves to ensuring Gamers Outreach is a trusted charity for gamers and those supported by our work. We are committed to games being used for good. We are a gaming brand that enables interactive experiences in hospitals.
• We inspire and heal through play.
  We believe access to recreation helps enrich a person’s quality of life. This is especially evident while a person is receiving care in a hospital setting. Our organization provides resources that help make video game content readily available and easy to manage in hospitals.
• Why do we do it?
  We stand for kids, their families, and hospital staff providing care. We believe video games are a platform capable of improving the patient experience. Our programs aid the healing process by providing entertainment, relief, socialization, and a sense of normalcy to families and patients spending time inside hospitals.
• We value community.
  Our organization was founded by a community of gamers determined to make a difference. Our programs are driven by community involvement. We believe the video game community is capable of doing incredible good. We hope to inspire fellow gamers to engage with their local hospitals.
• We are stewards – helping others level up!
  Our staff and volunteers embody the identity, mission, and community values of Gamers Outreach programs. We are responsible for ensuring our programs add value to the lives of patients, their families, and hospital staff. Our team bridges the gap between the gaming community and the hospital environment. Every action on behalf of the organization should prioritize our community’s well-being and those we support in hospitals.

Our Programs

Our program philosophy is inspired by two key observations we’ve consistently recognized across healthcare facilities:

• Many hospitals are not equipped with entertainment devices or infrastructure that makes premium gaming content readily accessible to patients (e.g. consoles, controllers, monitors, games, etc.).
• When technology is present, it can be difficult for hospital staff to manage entertainment due to several factors (unfamiliarity with equipment, existing responsibilities, ease of mobility, bandwidth limitations, etc.).

The majority of our resources are deployed amongst four programs we believe help make gaming accessible in different ways:

• GO Karts are hardware solutions. Each GO Kart helps ensure hardware is available to support AAA gaming experiences in hospitals where infrastructure may not exist!
• Player 2 volunteers are knowledge helpers. They’re gamers who provide expertise to make sure technology is working as intended within hospitals.
• Save Point is a distribution solution. Through dedicated Save Points, we can equip kids with take-home items, and empower them with a sense of accomplishment after progressing through treatment.
• Portal is a software solution incubated within Gamers Outreach. In hospitals where infrastructure exists, we can enable hundreds of patient rooms to be connected simultaneously without kids needing to wait a turn to play.

Defining Impact

As we expand, it’s helpful to consider a few terms we use to define our impact.

• Gaming Experiences. You’ll notice the front page of our website lists the number of “annual gaming experiences” our devices provide. This number reflects what we believe to be our capacity-for-use, given the number of GO Karts and devices across hospitals. A “gaming experience” is defined as “every time a child plays a game on our device.” There are instances the same child day-to-day may use a GO Kart. There are also scenarios where a GO Kart is deployed in a playroom and used by 20+ children per day.
• Saturation (program footprint): We’re working towards a scenario where all kids have access to play without needing to wait their turn. This means providing the right type of devices, as well as the right quantity. A “fully saturated” hospital is a facility that requires no more devices. If our “program footprint” expands, it means we’ve added more devices across hospitals.
• Breadth: There are hundreds of pediatric hospitals in the United States alone. So long as our programs are of benefit, we hope to maintain a presence in each!

Current Impact

2022 was our most active year of fundraising to-date, while 2023 represented a period of important evolution specifically centered around the redesign of our new GO Karts. Since our last annual report we’ve:

• Added 22 New Healthcare Facilities. As of this blog, Gamers Outreach maintains a presence across 400 hospitals! Our organization employs multiple people who actively provide support and answer questions for staff across these facilities. We’re focused on providing kids with entertainment so staff can focus on providing care!
• Deployed 216 More GO Karts. We cleared the entirety of our GO Kart 2.0 inventory. Our active fleet is now comprised of just under 2,000 units. As well, in late 2023, we rolled out the very first GO Kart 3.0 units!
• Maintained Activity in 9 Countries. Gamers Outreach continues to operate across 9 different countries. With the launch of GO Kart 3.0, we’ve made drastic improvements to shipping and freight logistics which will make our programs more readily available for hospitals outside the U.S. in the coming year. The manufacturing process of our new GO Karts was completed in the Fall of 2023, which means we’ll be ramping up international deployments throughout the upcoming year.
• Enabled 600,000 More Gaming Experiences. We now estimate our collective programming enables as many as 5.1 million instances of play each year. That’s a 15% increase since our last report. Bravo!

Some more fun highlights from our 2023 activity include:

• Launched New GO Karts. We’ve referenced it multiple times now, but it’s worth emphasizing again! GO Kart 3.0 IS FINALLY HERE! Our flagship program has been redesigned from the ground up thanks to support from our partners at NZXT. We had originally planned to unveil this redesign in mid-2023, with expectation our existing GO 2.0 Kart inventory would last until that time. However, an unexpected windfall of funding from Hermitcraft in late 2022 claimed all of our units. To help fulfill the entirety of their raise and meet additional requests, we made the decision to move up our production schedule. In the short run, this meant forming a queue of requests throughout the summer of 2023 as we waited for GO Kart 3.0 manufacturing to finish. But the wait has been worthwhile. We’re now capable of manufacturing more GO Karts in a single batch than has been deployed in our history thus far. ONWARD!
• Return Of The LAN. It had been four long years since we last hosted our annual LAN party, the event which gave our organization its start. All of us were feeling a bit sentimental returning to the venue together in early 2023. So much had changed since we last gathered – for both our staff and attendees! Some of our team had since become parents, others had graduated college. We were so thrilled to regroup with our community – and with everyone’s streaming efforts, we raised over $500K during the event! We’re very much looking forward to seeing everyone online and in-person at Gamers for Giving 2024, scheduled for April 5 – 7!

• Board Expansion. Johnny Hou and our friends at NZXT have been supporters of Gamers Outreach for a number of years. In 2023, we were honored to welcome Johnny to our Board of Directors!
• VTuber Summer Slam. Our second-ever VTuber Summer Slam shattered all expectations! Collectively, the VTuber community set a new fundraising record for the event – raising nearly $490K in support of hospitalized families! Over 1,000 creators participated to make it happen!
• NFL Love. NFL players. Many are gamers just like us, but they lift a lot of weights, run fast, and catch footballs really good. We were grateful to continue our partnership with Christian McCaffrey and his initiative, The Logan Project. We also loved seeing Sauce Gardner wear these iced out cleats in support of our cause. And of course, Casey Kreiter kept the multi-year streak going with some Minecraft-inspired designs!
• Spooktacular. Hundreds of creators joined forces to raise over $400,000 during our annual Halloween marathon!
• Location 400! We finally crossed FOUR HUNDRED supported hospitals! Congratulations to M Health Fairview in Burnsville, MN on being the magic location!  

Finances

Our audited tax return for 2022 is now available, and the numbers reflect another incredible period of support. More than $4.2 million was raised during our 2022 fiscal year! That’s an 11% increase since our 2021 filing! During that same window of time, we allocated $3.3 million towards expenditures, with 80% of those funds being directly associated with our programs. That’s 17% more allocated capital when compared to our 2021 report.

For those interested, our full Form 990 can be viewed here.

The funds raised during 2022 largely informed our strategy for program activity during 2023. Most substantially, we made a large investment in the manufacturing process for GO Kart 3.0. In the long run, this will allow us to deploy more GO Karts than we ever would’ve imagined when the program first began. Now that the units are completed, we’re anticipating much faster and more widespread deployment in the years to come. That means MORE GAMING for hospitalized families!

Our audited financial statements for 2023 won’t be finished until later this Fall, but it’s looking like ~$3.3 million was raised between cash and in-kind contributions. More details around our 2023 fundraising activity will be published once our next audit is complete!

Defining Success

Four key metrics help define our idea of success in hospitals. Our programs exist in a diverse landscape of facilities across the country. We believe these four considerations are ubiquitous across hospitals, and they represent how we think about fulfillment:

• Equipment / Content Saturation. Each hospital environment is unique in its ability to house equipment and provide patients with access to content. A 600-bed facility has different hardware and content needs than a 20-bed facility. Our long-term goal is to assist hospitals in reaching their unique “saturation points” so that content is readily available to patients.
• Patient Engagement. We define patient engagement in terms of access to activities. What entertainment offerings existed (if any) to patients before Gamers Outreach programs, and how accessible were those activities to patients? Example: did patients need to wait X hours before playing a video game, or were games available immediately?
• Improved Patient Outcomes. In our experience, hospitals place a high degree of importance on measuring “patient outcomes.” Loosely defined, this encompasses how quickly / fully a patient recovers during treatment. We believe games are capable of contributing towards improved patient outcomes.
• Improved Patient Experience. For our purposes, we think of the patient experience as the overall sentiment a person may have during hospitalization. It can also be an indicator of how a patient “feels” day-to-day. Patients often report their “pain scores” to attending healthcare staff, which help determine sense of comfort or injury tolerance. We believe games are capable of facilitating improved patient experiences.

Looking Ahead

Gamers Outreach programs wouldn’t be possible without the support of our community of donors. It’s thanks to you we’ve been able to create moments of PLAY for kids and families receiving care.

We’re thrilled to see GO Kart 3.0 land in hospitals around the world. As we enter 2024, our team is fully mobilized around a primary objective: support every wish list hospital. We are committed to providing GO Karts to every facility that has requested units. We hope you’ll join us on our quest throughout the year!

Until next time!