Responsible Gambling Week Support is growing
The Responsible Gambling week campaign starts today the 7th of November and runs until the 13th of November. This is a cross- industry campaign which hopes to encourage people to gamble responsibly and is about raising awareness.
Gambling sites, advertising spaces at football stadiums, posters displayed in betting premises will have pop-up and banner ads with the slogan “Let’s talk about responsible gambling”
For John Hagan, partner at Harris Hagan and chair of the Industry Group for Responsible Gambling (IGRG), making the message hard to avoid was a major part of one of the IGRG’s goals for the week: to make it clear that its messages were for everyone.
“What we are trying to do is to make the safer gambling messaging part of the experience for everybody. It’s a perfectly normal, responsible thing to set limits on how much you spend, on how long you’ll play for. It’s like putting on a seatbelt when you get in a car. It’s for everybody. By having these messages everywhere we’re trying to get that message across to all gamblers and not just those who are experiencing problems with their gambling.”
The ubiquity of a slogan, however, is naturally secondary to its content and to Hagan, “Let’s talk about safer gambling,” means exactly what it says.
While there will be many targets for the week, Hagan said that the number of conversations about responsible gambling will be among the most important, alongside making players aware of responsible gambling tools and engagement with RG week resources.
“An important part of the week is our Responsiblegambling.org site which is an information hub for everything you need to know about safer gambling, and will be available year-round,” Hagan said. “But I also want to hear about the number of conversations being had in betting shops and casinos, I want to hear about the number of interactions there have been in the online world.
“I’d also like to think – and we can’t measure this – that there would be many conversations going on among friends of people who gamble, between family members, that responsible gambling week has acted as a natural trigger for those conversations to happen both in the shops and at home”.
