El proyecto proyectado

The EL President, Friedrich Stickler,

opened this Seminar on Responsible Gaming (RG) - warmly and professionally hosted by Mercè Claramunt, Director of the Loteria de Catalunya- with encouraging words to those who were embarking on the task of Certifi- cation for the first time, and congratulations to the ten EL Member Lotteries who had

already been certified as being in alignment with the EL RG Standards. Joan Laporta,

Catalan Minister of Internal Affairs, then addressed the 75 Delegates from 22 Euro- pean States and displayed a genuine interest in Social Responsibility and encouraged all those present to embrace Responsible Gam- ing practices as being the most professional and business-like way to develop gaming over the coming years. He referred to recent positive EU Court rulings, but urged that State Lotteries should continue their drive to implement the highest standards of re- sponsibility in all their operations.

The tone of the Seminar was set and under- pinned by two excellent keynote presenta- tions from David Grayson, Director of the Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibil- ity and Dr Jonathan Parke of the University of Salford Centre for the Study of Gambling. The messages from David Grayson were clear …

• There was much international evidence that companies who did not behave re- sponsibly would be “punished by the consumers”, while those who behaved re- sponsibly would be “rewarded”

• It is now popular for companies to commit to 3 P’s - People, Profit and Planet • Good companies were moving across a

spectrum of customer relations where “trust me” is no longer a sufficient corpo- rate claim, but the consumer wants the company to “tell me”, and finally wants the company to “show me”

• Customers are becoming more powerful and enabled, with “choice editing” and “choice influencing” of products and serv- ices becoming the norm.

• Be careful not to be accused of engaging in “Greenwashing”

Dr Parke presented an extensive overview of Internet gambling behaviour across a number of European (and International) ju-

risdictions. His summary was that between 2004 and 2009 there was little research evidence of any significant increase in the numbers of adolescents playing games for money on the Internet. Also, he claimed that there was no conclusive evidence that Inter- net gambling offers more risk of harm than other forms of gambling. He provided many insights into the characteristics of games that might be problematic for vulnerable players. One interesting conclusion was that there was no evidence that the payout ratio impacted on the level of problem gambling. His parting message was to learn about your players through deep research, and develop games and facilities that would be consistent with, and encourage safe and responsible player behaviour. The Lottery-specific contents of the Seminar were developed and designed by the mem- bers of the EL Responsible Gaming Working Group under the very able chairmanship of Anne Pattberg, Head of Responsible Gaming at Camelot. Anne delivered a historic per- spective on the development of the Respon- sible Gaming Standards and Certification process, which set the scene for a number of papers covering the practical experiences of lotteries who had achieved Certification.

Carlos Bachmaier from LAE explained in some detail, and with great clarity, how the overall Certification process works and, of equal importance, why the process was de- signed in the way it is presented.

This was followed by a very interesting pair of back-to-back presentations from Guillem Salvans (Head of Responsible Gaming at the Loteria de Catalunya) and Eloi Montcada (Director of the Consultancy Department of LaVola Sustainability Services) who acted as Assessor for the Loteria de Catalunya. The main messages were:

From the Lottery point-of-view …

• Must have strong Senior Management support for the whole process

Friedrich Stickler, joan Laporta, mercè Claramunt

• Must involve all company employees • Must have specific budget, including dedi- cated human resources • Many benefits accrue to the Lottery com- pany from the certification process From the Assessor point-of-view …

• Assessor’s approach is very important; Lavola developed their own templates for the audit, based on the EL Standards

• In depth Audit of sample of 45 Retail Sales Agents was very important

• 15 days for the whole process was ad- equate

Guillem gave an excellent synthesis of the whole RG effort when he said that “Giving the odds of winning a prize in an instant game as 1-in-4 was Marketing. Giving the complete prize structure of an instant game, including the odds of winning the top prize, was Responsible Gaming”.

Herbert Beck (Austrian Lotteries) and Konrad Supper (WestLotto) shared their experience of the Certification process. Konrad summarised the process as a case of “Nothing new, but a new state-of-mind”. He emphasised that many lotteries were al- ready operating with the highest standards of RG, but they now had to change the way they regarded and classified such behaviour. Herbert echoed this point and reinforced the point by emphasising the importance of “documentation, documentation and docu- mentation” of all the existing RG processes.

Both of these contributors also commented on how positively all of the staff of their lot- teries had responded to being certified as aligned with the standards.

Delegates were presented with three per- spectives on support tools and services that are available to them. These included Petra Forsström presenting the services available from IRGO and the depth of research ex- perts available as well as access to tools such as GAM-GaRD which can help game design- ers to be more aware of the potential impact of games upon vulnerable players. Professor Peren gave a detailed presentation on the contents of his tool - AsTERiG ( Assessment Tool to measure and Evaluate the Risk po- tential of Gambling products). On the basis of twelve parameters, the tool shows the concrete risk potentials of gambling prod- ucts. The third tool, described by Zenita Strandanger (Head of CSR at Svenska Spel), was Playscan which also provides a formal measuring tool to assess the effect of lottery games on potentially vulnerable players. In addition to the “tools”, Zenita also described the Svenska Spel philosophy of keeping their players in the “green zone” where their par- ticipation in gaming was moderate and left them in no danger. The message about all such “assessment tools” is that their effectiveness is heavily dependent on the subjective values assigned to the vari- able parameters contained within the models.

Areti Markou, Business Development Man- ager at Intralot gave a short presentation which demonstrated the importance at- tached by Intralot to providing support tools and facilities in their lottery systems to sup- port the RG aspirations of lotteries.

The final session comprised two presen- tations, one from Joan Espuelas, Project Manager with the Gaming Regulator in Cat- alunya, who described the voluntary Code of Good Practice which was in place for gam- ing in Catalunya (which included education for students in the classroom). They used the Code from Queensland in Australia as a model and found that the best way to have such codes generally accepted by the gam- ing sector is to engage in deep negotiation with all of the representatives. The second speaker was Javier Miro, Secretary General of Andemar (gambling trade association) in Catalunya. His message was simple. Gaming is a healthy activity, and operators should not apologise for offering gaming facilities to players. It was a question of balancing the social consequences with the economic consequences. He saw it as the clear respon- sibility for each of the gaming sectors in cat- alunya to respond to and deal with the con- sequences of its own gaming business. The remainder of the Seminar was taken up with practical workshops, “Listening Posts” and Case Studies where the delegates had ample opportunity to explore all the ele- ments of RG in detail and to question those “experts” present who were more advanced along the path of implementing the Stand- ards and achieving Certification about their experiences.

Many of the questions and answers will be of general interest to all EL Members, and will be included in the FAQ section of the Re- sponsible Gaming & CSR section (password protected) of the EL website. Ray BaTES EL Honorary President Seminar moderator