Duty Calls: How a Video Game Company’s Foundation Focuses on Veteran Employment

team space force plays in call of duty endowment code bowl

First things first—let the record show that this writer holds a kill/death ratio that is top 14% in the world. For the non-video game nerds among us, that’s a reference to Call of Duty, the blockbuster first-person shooter franchise that posted net bookings surpassing $3 billion in the last 12 months alone, according to Activision. Call of Duty had sold more than 300 million copies as of the summer of 2019, and in 2020, it was more popular than ever.

Gaming has come a long way from Pong, Pac-Man and Mario. One firm forecasted that the 2020 global games industry would reach nearly $160 billion and will surpass $200 billion by the end of 2023. Today, around 45% of gamers are women. And with an excess of time spent indoors and in serious need of a distraction, more people have been booting up Playstations, Xboxes and tricked-out gaming PCs to enjoy their favorite games solo and with friends.

We also saw philanthropic giving woven into COVID-era gaming. Early in the pandemic, NBA athletes competed in an NBA2K tournament, with Phoenix Suns star Devin Booker donating his $100,000 grand prize in support of coronavirus relief efforts. Sure, the event mixed entertainment and charity, but it also allowed players and fans to connect in an unprecedented way, giving fans an inside look at players’ homes and how they’d been passing time during lockdown—all while modeling good pandemic behavior.

Then there was the CODE Bowl, which kicked off on December 11 and featured eight teams fighting it out in a Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War tournament to raise awareness and funds for veteran employment. It marked the first trans-Atlantic military esports competition and included all five U.S. Department of Defense military branches and the U.K. military. The tournament raised more than $900,000, raking in hundreds of thousands of views between YouTube and Twitch, a video game streaming platform.

“CODE,” by the way, stands for Call of Duty Endowment, a nonprofit co-founded by Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, the American video game holding company based in Santa Monica, California. The endowment helps veterans find high-quality careers by supporting groups that prepare them for the job market and by raising awareness of the value vets bring to the workplace. Leveraging the powerful Call of Duty brand, CODE has placed nearly 80,000 veterans in jobs since its 2009 founding, and plans to get 100,000 veterans back to work by 2024. Activision Blizzard pays for all the endowment’s overhead costs and has donated more than $38 million to the charity to date.

“I’m a vet myself. I spent nine years on active duty, and another 18 in the reserves,” explains Dan Goldenberg, Call of Duty Endowment executive director, in a recent interview. A captain in the U.S. Navy, Goldenberg flew planes on active duty and was an intelligence officer. He went on to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School and after working in business for a time, got a call from Activision inviting him to lead its corporate foundation. 

A focused, metrics-based approach

Goldenberg emphasizes how targeted and business-minded the endowment is, remaining laser-focused on veteran employment alone. It partners with organizations like Salvation Army, Workshops for Warriors, VetJobs and Hire Heroes USA, working with Deloitte to find and vet the organizations driving the most impact in the employment space. CODE’s Seal of Distinction, which comes with a $30,000 award, is bestowed upon these highest-performing nonprofits.

The endowment assesses an organization in four ways: fact checking performance data; conducting background checks on key staff; performing historical, current and future financial strength analysis; and doing a policies and procedures check. “Those four elements have helped us find the highest-performance organizations we’re looking for. And we’ve done this at about $499, or one-sixth the cost per placement of the federal government,” Goldenberg told me, citing Department of Labor numbers.

Goldenberg puts heavy emphasis on the high-quality jobs part of the equation. In recent years, he says, one in three vets were underemployed, but that number could be as high as 60%. One problem with employment data is rooted in the limitations of a question from the U.S. Census that asks, “last week, were you paid for work?”

“If you worked 10 hours a week, somehow, that’s fully employed. So this is a terrible measure of the economic quality of life someone has. Quality matters, and our metrics really track that, and we hold our organizations accountable for that,” Goldenberg says.

The endowment aims for a tough-minded, warm-hearted approach. It boasts a six-month retention rate at about 90%, and 94% of job placements made by grantees were for full-time work. CODE also aims to streamline the application process, easing the burden on nonprofits. The open call application is only a little over a page and the endowment sends the most promising nonprofits for additional assessment from Deloitte.

“We always respect a nonprofit’s time,” Goldenberg says. “You should never ask for more data than you need. We ask for the same data every year. Is this a fair request? Will it take them away from their mission? So we focus on making our administrative asks as easy as possible.”

All hands on deck

Starting with Call of Duty: Black Ops II in 2012, top video game streamers have competed in The Race, a marathon fundraising event that allows fans to watch 24/7 gameplay as streamers grind (to use gaming parlance) to reach master prestige in five days—a distinction that normally takes yours truly months to achieve with normal play. In 2015, The Race helped raise more than $450,000 for the Call of Duty Endowment.

“This was the ancestor of CODE Bowl,” Goldenberg explains.

Today, the endowment raises funds in three ways. The first is selling in-game items like the Challenger Pack, which features custom weaponry and other goodies. All of the net proceeds from sales go to the endowment, and will be available for purchase until the endowment raises $5 million. CODE also has corporate partnerships with companies like video game retailing giant GameStop. And it runs fundraising events, the biggest of which is CODE Bowl.

“In-game items, we know, are incredibly powerful in connecting gamers to our cause. Gamers vote with their wallets, so to speak. And they donate because they care. I find that gamers are very committed if you approach them the right way. Gen Z cares deeply, and we’ve raised millions from in-game items,” Goldenberg says.

The endowment runs a lean operation, with only two full-time staff. The corporate foundation does draw upon Activision Blizzard employees, who contribute their time and skills. At any given time, some 30 employees are actively engaged with the foundation. The association of prominent streamers with CODE Bowl and other events is a result of relationships that the company’s influencers team cultivated.

And while the endowment provides an important case study for the kind of philanthropy going on in the video games industry, Goldenberg believes his operation can be instructive for corporate philanthropy overall, noting that the sector at large needs to move beyond the fire-and-forget approach.

“We don’t do that. We have strings attached in the sense that we expect impact. Some write the check and walk away. But applying this business lens matters. The gaming industry has some guilt there, but it’s across corporate philanthropy writ large… My recommendation to our peer companies is to pick a cause area, go deep, and stick with it,” he says.

Revising the narrative

In the early days of the pandemic, Activision Blizzard donated an additional $2 million to respond to growing needs on the ground. According to the endowment, it has placed more veterans in the first three quarters of 2020 than any year prior, with about 15,000 placements. The charity also had its largest grantmaking year—$8.5 million—a more than 30% increase.

“Right now, the need for certain specialities has been enormous—medical, logistics, communications are some of the most underemployed, now,” Goldenberg says. The USS Mercy and Comfort, powered by corpsmen (the Navy equivalent of medics) were at the ready for Los Angelenos and New Yorkers. But these same medics have no real standing in the civilian medical community when they leave military service.

Why? Red tape, Goldenberg says.

“You have to start over. And that’s ridiculous. Fifty percent of vets with medical training who want to continue working in the medical community cannot,” he says, adding that similar stories play out across other armed services roles: “Military truck drivers can drive an 18-wheeler through the Khyber Pass, one of the most dangerous roads in the world, but can’t drive down the I-10.”

The endowment works with organizations to provide the commercial training required so that work-hungry veterans can make the transition and leverage their talent and experience. This work goes beyond job fairs to helping write civilian-ready resumes, conducting mock interviews, and pairing vets with guidance counselors.

The charity is also increasingly working the public policy and education angle, using op-eds, podcasts and other media. In a compelling post on LinkedIn, Goldenberg writes that “as a nation, we are wasting the enormous investment in medical training and experience—significantly more than $100,000 per person—made in each one of these veterans in deference to an obsolete state-level certification regime.”

Endowment personnel have their eyes set squarely on their goal of 100,000 job placements by 2024. And before we ended our conversation, Goldenberg made sure to emphasize that employment is the most prominent issue facing veterans today, though the narrative and philanthropic dollars often flow elsewhere, including to wounded warriors or toward mental health challenges like PTSD.

“The public conception of where the need is, is off-kilter. More than 3 million have served since 9/11. Of those, about 2,000 have lost a limb. Not taking anything away from these folks who deserve all the help they can get. Fact is, though, everyone leaving the military needs the job,” Goldenberg says.