Greetings, gamers! As you’ve likely seen from all the recent Gamers for Giving activity, our team is back in our virtual office and excited to tackle the months ahead.
We always like to start the year by reflecting on the impact many of you have made possible. Your donations, time, and advocacy continue to create moments of joy for hospitalized families. It’s the honor of our staff to deploy the resources you’ve given. Our team is excited to wake up each day and provide ongoing support to hundreds of hospital facilities worldwide. Elevating the spirits of children who are going through treatment is a task we take seriously, and are proud to exercise our knowledge as gamers to ensure kids have access to activities while they recover.
In this report, we’ll take a look at our 2023 financials, which recently became available for public viewing via our latest Form 990 and Audited Statements. As well, we’ll reflect on some big moments in 2024 – many of which were made possible thanks to investments that came to fruition in late 2023.
The most significant and financially material project was the launch of our new GO Kart.
As we detailed in numerous blogs, in late 2022 we made a big investment (approximately $1.2M) to revamp the way we manufacture GO Karts. The result? We’re now able to build thousands of units as opposed to hundreds. This means we can deliver more GO Karts throughout the year than was ever possible before. In total, the design and fabrication process took ~three years. The first units started to roll out in late 2023, and we began fulfilling a list of requests throughout 2024.
As we look ahead in 2025; we’ve gathered a lot of learnings from the past year delivering the new GO Karts. We have four big projects we hope to tackle, including an updated wishlist from our hospital partners.
Let’s dive in!
Introduction
We have continued to maintain our core identity which instigated our founding nearly 20 years ago. We believe in the value of play, and it’s this belief which informs our 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!
However 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.
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 video game 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 the following programs:
- 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 in order to play. We are excited to share new updates on Portal later this year.
- NEW Program: During our upcoming Gamers for Giving event, we’ll be announcing a new program. Stay tuned!
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
In late 2023, we finished the manufacturing process of our new GO Karts and immediately began deploying units to hospital partners. Going into 2024, and since our last annual report, we’ve:
- Added 70 New Healthcare facilities. As of this blog, Gamers Outreach maintains a presence across 476 hospitals! That’s a 17% increase in our footprint since last year! We also employ multiple staff who provide support and answer questions for health workers across these facilities. We’re focused on providing kids with entertainment so health professionals can focus on providing care. We also continued to provide help and equipment to our existing network of partners.
- Deployed nearly 600 GO Karts! Our team got straight to work deploying a list of reservations that had accumulated in 2023 and 2024. This was the most GO Karts we’ve deployed in a calendar year – a 155% increase from the year prior! We anticipate this number growing further with the completion of our newest design. At the start of 2024, we also noted in multiple posts we had an outstanding wishlist of more than 600 GO Kart requests from partner hospitals. We’re thrilled to share that of our GO Kart deliveries and commitments, we have been able to respond directly to more than half those requests! As of this report, we still have a handful of units our team is working to fulfill in the weeks ahead. We anticipate those being fully deployed by Q2 of this year. We also delivered a number of GO Karts based on the regional preferences of donors.
- Maintained Activity in 13 Countries. While the majority of our activity is centered around the United States – we believe wherever there are games, Gamers Outreach programs can and should exist! In the past year we added 4 new countries to our global impact map, with more still coming.
Finances
Our 2023 financial year represented a period of major transition for our organization, despite headwinds for both the nonprofit sector and game industry at large.
Fundraising-wise, 2022 was one of our best years in terms of contributions received, while 2023 saw a decline in overall giving by ~20%. From a management standpoint: this was particularly challenging since we, as noted above, had deployed funds to improve the GO Kart manufacturing process in late 2022. Thankfully prior years of fiscal responsibility helped us navigate the period, and we realized a substantial improvement in overall giving throughout 2024 – which will be noted in our annual report next year. As well, we were able to make significant progress on our programs – even delivering a record number of GO Karts – in spite of a down year of fundraising.
In 2023 we raised just over $3.3M in contributions. During that same window, we incurred ~$4.3M in expenses, with nearly $3.5M of those costs being directly related to our programs. Approximately $1.6M was tied directly to GO Kart manufacturing and the associated upgrades discussed above. In total, this resulted in 80% of our expenditures being directly related to programmatic costs.
For those interested, our Form 990 and Audited Statements can be viewed under the “2023 Fiscal Year” box, located on this page.
Our audited financial statements for 2024 won’t be finished until later this year, but it’s looking like ~$4.7 million was raised between cash and in-kind contributions. That’s a major upswing from 2023! More details around our fundraising activity and relevant expenses 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
As we gear up for our first fundraising events of the year, there are four big projects we are hoping to tackle throughout 2025. We plan to share more details on these goals during Gamers for Giving, but broadly speaking, they include:
- Upgrading Infrastructure & Throughput. Now that we can physically construct more GO Karts, we need to increase our ability to equip those units with devices and software! One of the bottlenecks of our current process is prepping devices/game consoles that go with each unit. While we are now able to construct more GO Karts at a time, we are in the midst of upgrading our processes to ensure the devices/software that accompany those GO Karts can be prepped at a quicker pace. We are putting plans in motion to speed this process up so we can ship GO Karts faster each week!
- Continue Supporting Wishlist Hospitals. We were able to address a substantial number of Wishlist requests throughout last year. Simultaneously – our team continues to receive requests for new GO Karts from hospitals. Based on a recent survey with hospital partners, current requests stand at more than 800 devices in the U.S. alone. We hope to fundraise for these requests through key events that’ll be hosted during the year.
- Expand Save Point. We’re excited to share more plans for Save Point during Gamers for Giving this April. The team has been working hard to secure donated items and upgrade software for the machines. This year we’re hoping to place more throughout hospitals!
- Launch New Program. This is an initiative we’ll be sharing more of during Gamers for Giving! Stay tuned.
That’s all for now. We hope to see you involved throughout the year!