How Club Penguin teaches charity
Yesterday I heard Lance Priebe, the co-founder of Club Penguin speak at AnimFX 2011. I was looking forward to his talk because Club Penguin is kind of a big deal. It’s a safe virtual world where children can play games and chat with each other. With over 150 million users between the ages of 6 and 14 it’s the most popular child oriented site around. Ask any 10 year old and chances are they’ll be able to tell you all about Club Penguin.
The whole story of Lance told of growing Club Penguin from a side project to an acquisition by Disney was remarkable, but the highlight for me was hearing about their Coins for Change program.
In Club Penguin kids earn coins by playing games, and then they can spend those coins on stuff like clothes for their penguin and decorations for their igloo. Each year when Christmas comes around, the kids are given a choice: they can buy themselves presents with their hard earned coins, or they can donate them by throwing them in a well. This is Coins for Change.
Every year Club Penguin produces a video showing what happens to the coins. You see the coins fall down the well (which looks more like a cauldron) and travel through an underground pipe until the pipe surfaces in Africa. The coins fly out of the pipe and into the hands of African children (at this point we switch from cartoon animation to video footage).
In halting english, the African children explain the impact that the coins donated by Club Penguin members has had on their lives. They show off the schools and playgrounds that have been built, and they say thank you, a lot. Watch the 2010 Coins for Change video here. This is the reward for donating.
Last year Club Penguin members donated over 12 billion coins, or about one million US dollars. That represents the decisions of millions of children around the world to forgo a new igloo decoration and donate to charity instead.
It will be a few years before Club Penguin’s users face decisions like this in real life but through their penguins they’re already learning how charity fits into their lives and how rewarding it can be to donate.
