On World Kindness Day, The VIA Agency launches The Good Fight: A Game to Make The World A Kinder Place
PORTLAND, Maine (PRWEB) November 13, 2015 -- In honor of World Kindness Day, The VIA Agency, a full-service marketing, advertising and digital agency, has just announced the launch of The Good Fight, a mobile game designed to turn simple acts of kindness into friendly competition. This launch is the beginning of a year-long competition to track kind acts across the country in search of America’s kindest city.
The Good Fight is the result of a joint initiative between Preble Street, a local Portland resource center, and The VIA Agency. “A few years ago, we started to notice a lessening of kindness in our society, “ said Mark Swan, Executive Director of Preble Street, “Somewhere and somehow we started to become less caring towards one another and it became okay to be intolerant. As this behavior reaches the next generation, it is the beginning of the full-blown empathy crisis that we see today. We had to do something, so we asked VIA to help us create a campaign to bring back kindness.”
Instead of creating a traditional advertising campaign or digital effort to encourage kindness, The VIA Agency used the empathy crisis as a catalyst for the development of a unique game. “There are plenty of good people who go the extra step to help others,” said Leeann Leahy, CEO of The VIA Agency, “but the vast majority want the world to be a better place, they just don’t want to have to change their own lives to make it one, so we knew it needed to be easy and fun. We wanted to gamify kindness.” Enter, The Good Fight…a mobile game that gives you credit for the simple, every day things you do…things that are already kind… and rewards you with points in a friendly competition.
It doesn’t take much effort to start tracking your kindness. Just download the app from the App store to your iPhone and connect through Facebook. Then go about living your life, using the app to instantly log in your kind acts as “points” for your city and yourself. Every kindness counts — from smiling at a stranger, to holding a door, to volunteering in a soup kitchen … any act big or small is valued. And with a city-feed and a map view, you can explore kindness happening around you in real time. For additional points, you can share your kind acts and photos through Instagram and Twitter and challenge others in your social networks to do the same.
The game pits players against their friends, all other players, and ultimately aggregates all the kindness points in your area to create a city vs. city competition. Leaderboards show you how you are doing and can be viewed across all three measures.
“We are on a quest to find the kindest city in America,” says Leahy, “so, will be accumulating data for the next year to do so. If we have a bit of fun along the way and maybe just maybe make the world a better, kinder place…well, that’s a win for all of us!”
More details about The Good Fight as well as instructional videos on how to play can be found here: thegoodfightchallenge.com
About The VIA Agency
The VIA Agency is an employee-owned, full-service marketing, advertising and digital agency that helps clients solve their most difficult marketing problems with creativity and innovation. Founded in 1993, the Portland, Maine-based VIA Agency offers a fresh perspective and distinguished record of creating the right ideas for clients and a legacy of reinvigorating brands. Named by Advertising Age and Creativity as 2011 Small Agency of the Year, The VIA Agency attracts national talent and blue-chip brands, and counts Unilever, Sam’s Club, Perdue Foods, Welch’s, Proximo Spirits, Golden Corral, TD Ameritrade and Facebook among its clients. To learn more about The VIA Agency and its thought leaders please visit our website here.
About Preble Street
With 14 programs throughout the state of Maine, Preble Street is the hub of services in northern New England’s largest urban area, providing round-the-clock programs 365 days a year to meet urgent needs, empower people, advocate for change and create solutions for homelessness, hunger, and poverty.
Jessie Gilligan, The VIA Agency, http://www.theviaagency.com, +1 (207) 232-0027, [email protected]
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