The Safe Bet Show returns focusing on the topic of player well-being, prevention and the future of responsible gambling, assisted by an industry expert in Dr. Jennifer Shatley, Executive Director of Roga (Responsible Online Gaming Association), who gave us a full breakdown on this section of the industry.

Speaking to Martin Lycka on SBC’s Safe Bet Show, the duo honed in on the topic of responsible gambling. While the term ‘responsible gambling’ can divide opinion, Shatley helped to provide a deeper understanding of her work and the challenges they face bringing new processes to help RG. She also outlined five key pillars for ROGA as well as potential future innovations that could help to bring more successful change in the sector.

The process of research in better understanding the industry

“Research is crucial, it drives effective measures. We need to make sure that what we’re putting in place is evidence-based and we need to make sure that we have evaluations frameworks attached for what we put into place. It should be that we’re constantly evaluating and adapting policy and understand more.

“I think what’s been problematic with research is research for the sake of research is not effective. What we really need attached to the work we are doing is some way to translate that research into what is effective and actionable in a gaming environment. If we’re using it to make actual programs and things we can actually implement and put into place, that’s effective. Some ideas sound like really good ideas but they won’t actually work in a gaming environment so we need to look at that.”

Five key pillars

With eight leading US major gaming operators (making 90% of the market) all combining to form the ROGA organisation, there is a significant responsibility on those to continue in their pursuit of growing as a single operation. In order to do so, Shatley named the five key pillars that they are focusing on, including research, evidence-based best practices, education, data-clearing house and certification programs.

“Research is going to underpin almost everything we do but it is research that actually drives initiatives that we are translating into actionable programs. That will lead to evidence-based best practices; what is it that we should be doing across the industry from a responsible gaming perspective and that is what are the standards that are the best practices.

“The third is we are really looking at education for a variety of different audiences. The first one we’ve launched is around college-aged students because looking at the age group with this new-found freedom, some of them are already involved and giving a foundational knowledge of RG is important for this group.

“I think over the years there’s been a lot of focus on student athletes, which there should be, but the target student population was widely ignored so that’s something where we thought we could make a difference and that one launched in February called ‘Know Your Play’.

“A lot of information around RG but also financial literacy; around savings, debt, limit setting, these are all important concepts in life but also tied to RG.

“Then there’s a data-clearing house which will have a shared self-exclusion list of members across all jurisdictions. The final one is a certification program and that is to set the US standard for RG and to give assurances to regulators that those who get this certification meet this rigid standards and let players know that these are legal regulated sites and that they meet the standards.

“From an operator perspective, to let them know where they’re doing well and where there’s opportunities to improve and enhance what they’re doing and we are in the request for proposal process right now.”

Future goals for ROGA

In terms of ROGA’s future, Shatley was asked to reveal future goals that the company could hope to achieve, to which she brought plenty of fresh ideas including how better to integrate RG into the player experience, changing the perception of RG programs, personalisation and helping share information across platforms when it comes to self-exclusion.

“The first one would be how to better integrate responsible gambling into the player experience, so instead of having stand alone RG program, how do we make it part of that experience for the player from the time they enter a platform, to make that more streamlined and integrated.

“Secondly, to change the perception that these RG are problem gambling programs. That the intent of RG programs are people who are experiencing problems should engage with these progams because the reality is RG programs are prevention programs targeted at the entire customer base.

“Largely what we see is this conflation of the two that people tend not to engage in the programs because they think ‘well these are for people who are experiencing gambling problems and I don’t have a gambling program so this isn’t for me’. So changing that perception so we can really increase engagement in RG programs and RG tools. We know they’re useful and helpful if they are used, so how can we better position them to get more engagement.

“The next one would be personalisation; how can we personalise RG that will resonate with different people? Again, there’s no one-size-fits-all message. How we do help resonate across different cultures and mindsets, how do we make it more personalised than just this standard message for everyone.

“The fourth would be how do we better share information around guests across operators so we have a more holistic view as opposed to a platform review. How do we improve experiences? Or RG programs by having that wider view of a guest. That’s why we’re looking at self-exclusion first, so instead of having someone saying ‘I need to take a break from gambling’ and just one platform knows that, all operators would know this person needs to take a break from gambling and that would be supported across all the platforms.”