Giving Gamers - A ManiaPlanet Charity Project

[ben3847]

sho, rio & oy made some great promotional videos for the Giving Gamers Project!

Shortz' Video


Riolu's Video


Ozon's Video


About Giving Gamers:

ManiaPlanet is known for having a super nice & warm community. Players are creating new game modes, title packs, skins, videos - all kinds of creative content, every day, for free.
However, this is being taken to a new level with "Giving Gamers", a charity project hosted by wawawawu, a German community member. His idea was to collect planets - a somehow useless currency in ManiaPlanet - to exchange them into real money with the help of sponsors.
He received very positive feedback for this project, but it took him some time to actually tackle this project and present it to the public. Now, the basic idea is complete, sponsors are found and "Giving Gamers" is ready to rock.
"Giving Gamers" is focussing on supporting children charity projects all over the globe.
"Whenever disasters happen, children are always the most affected – regardless of whether the disaster is natural or manmade. Children are always at the mercy of fate and get often instrumentalized by various parties.
Whenever the earth on our little globe quakes, a vulcano bursts, avalanches, taifuns or tzunamis occur and waste big areas, if rain fails to appear for months or comes down like a flood and everything is submerged and washed away, if epidemics depopulates whole cities…
When anywhere in the world fights for borders, might, money, drugs, weapons, oil or the “right” religion are starting again…
One thing is for sure: Children are always most affected!"
Wawawawu and his sponsors managed to agree on an exchange rate of 1 Euro Cent per donated Planet - which means every single donation, no matter if it's "just" a small or a bigger one, will be very appreciated. 100% of the donated planets will be exchanged and forwarded to the organizations.
But Planets are not the only currency you can support the project with. Of course you can also donate real money via PayPal or Direct Transfer.
The current goal are 500.000 Planets, and together with your help we can reach this goal and get even further!
Find more information on the official website, available in 4 different languages.
http://giving-gamers.com/
It's a great cause and I can just highly recommend to share this ambitious project if you want to support this project. Thanks!

[nighthawk4571]

Is this a legally authorized, registered charity? If so, in which countries is it registered?

The question on your YouTube pages: 'How are Planets converted to Euro's?' has not been answered and there is no clear explanation on these sites:

http://giving-gamers.com/?lang=en
http://giving-gamers.com/spender/?lang=en
https://www.facebook.com/givinggamers
https://twitter.com/wawawawu66 .

Who are your sponsors?
Can you offer any examples of actual support given to existing groups anywhere in the world - have you sent money or goods to any children's organisations?
Have you received any letters of thanks for your support from any organisation?

So how do I know this is genuine? This seems like a nice idea but there must be a way for donators to feel confident that their donations are really going to help children.

Cheers

[Rots]

So how do I know this is genuine? This seems like a nice idea but there must be a way for donators to feel confident that their donations are really going to help children.

Exactly... It's good to have "popular" players involved into this as a reclaim for your campaign but... where are the sponsors?

What are you going to do with that much planets? appart from applying a conversion 1 planet <=> 1 cent?
are my questions too dumb?

[riolu]

Legitimate questions there. Trying to answer the questions from how much I have been told.
I understand that people are unsure about such projects, especially when it comes to charites, donations and things like that.

Who are your sponsors?

The founder of Giving Gamers is currently speaking to sponsors, e.g. big companies or private persons, who would be interested to support this project. To show that the ManiaPlanet community is active enough and to show that it's worth supporting this project, a goal of 500k planets has been set which needs to be reached in order to be somehow attractive to sponsors. Since we have reached this goal by far now, it is just about time to announce the sponsors. Some appointments with possible sponsors are set to this week, so an announcement will definitely happen very soon.

Can you offer any examples of actual support given to existing groups anywhere in the world - have you sent money or goods to any children's organisations?
Have you received any letters of thanks for your support from any organisation?

Since this is the first charity project of Giving Gamers, there is obviously no former support to mention.
If you are still sceptical you can still decide to observe this thing first and eventually step in and support the project

What are you going to do with that much planets? appart from applying a conversion 1 planet <=> 1 cent?

Apart from converting the planets to actual money, the planets will be used to host & support cups in all Maniaplanet titles and future LAN events hosted by Giving Gamers, from which the whole community can benefit.

[tombuilder]

I also spend. Even if this may finally fail, it`s still the best thing planets could be spend on. Great initiative!
But it really should be more clearly, that the sponsors are not yet paying (at least I did not find it).