A charity update

Hello everyone,

We have been made aware of a series of charity streams and player concerns around donations made to Macmillan on behalf of the streamer Hai im Lucas. Last week we spoke to Luke to understand what went wrong and the current donation situation. In this instance we were informed of a shortfall of donations due to a number of factors – we have addressed this with Luke in person, and we feel comfortable that intentions were good, but unfortunately the execution was less than optimal.

We are working internally on a Charity streaming program that will allow us to help streamers with charity events in terms of best practices, to ensure that player donations are given directly to the charity of choice and that players feel comfortable and assured in donating in future. To avoid such situations occurring in future, we will work on guidelines, and make sure this is publicly communicated to all of our streamers and players in due course.

Everyone at Jagex is passionate about our support of charity events. Be it GameBlast or supporting players on streams for charities that are near and dear to their hearts, we want players and streamers to have fun and create amazing experiences for players in support of great causes. As a result, we have made a donation of £1,020.36 to Macmillan today to cover any shortfall so that players or the charity are not out of pocket. This is an exceptional circumstance, and in future, as mentioned before, we’ll aim to put procedures in place to send monies to charities directly so this situation doesn’t happen again.

Thank you to all of you who continue to support great causes and we look forward to bringing you more details in the next few months!

The RuneScape Team

caddph

My understanding from what I last saw was that he recorded donations and didn't convert it to pounds, and essentially overstated the donation amount on stream/afterwards before being called out.

I'm not necessarily stating that's exactly what happened, just what I saw last after this whole situation. All I care about now is that Macmillan is getting the full donation amount recorded/announced, and that there'll be mitigation to this type of situation in the future. It wasn't handled well at all, and hoping we don't end up here again for any charity streams.

This is a fairly good point and this was one aspect of the communication breakdown between donations, pledges and currency conversion. As one of the people who met and spoke with both Luke and MacMillan, we are confident that there was no ill intent and that the result was one of lack of experience in how to effectively handle charity issues.

(2018) A charity update

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