AGA introduces watershed Responsible Gaming Intervention Effectiveness Scale

In the midst of Responsible Gambling Awareness Month (RGAM), the American Gaming Association (AGA) has had a new seminal announcement to make with the association devising a new Responsible Gaming Intervention Effectiveness scale, RG-IES.

RG-IES was developed by Drs. Jonathan Ross Gilbert and Marla Stafford are developed to offer the industry a definitive, evidence-based approach to helping prevent gambling-related harm in consumers.

New RG message assessment scale to help tailor industry communications

Backed by Bally’s, FanDuel and BetMGM, the scale will provide academics, industry members, and responsible gambling companies and advocates with a research-based tool that can specifically evaluate RG messages, and whether they are effective.

The RG-IES is a watershed in the sense that it addresses yet another aspect of the inherent responsibility that the industry has in protecting consumers – through communications campaigns.

However, no serious effort has been made to properly assess the effectiveness of such programs, and RG-IES is seeking to address just that and help the industry build a strong way to communicate and effectively make impressions on audiences.

RG-IES will look at how responsible gambling messages impact their intended audiences, whether they provoke thoughts, elicit feelings, or lead to behavioral changes in consumers who gamble.

Thanks to RG-IES, AGA and its partners are hoping to create a standardized benchmark for whether communication messages work and what communications messages are in fact the most effective, serving as a further blueprint for future efforts in the sector.

The RG-IES has been explained in detail by the researchers and AGA, who are keen to make sure that the RG messages utilized by casinos and sportsbooks are hitting the mark. One thing that the researchers have found out already is that the messages used need to be more cheerful, offering a "positive, fun, and engaging" approach.

Protecting consumers by creating "fun and engaging " RG messages

To gauge the effectiveness of a message, the RG-IES simply asks consumers to put a value to a statement they see – with 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). There are 15 statements that consumers need to evaluate about a communication or a message in this fashion. The researchers have concluded that if the total score divided by 15 is lower than 4, messaging used to promote RG by a company would be considered insufficient.

"The development of the RG-IES allows organizations to reliably and validly assess potential responsible gaming messages," the authors argue, confident that the program could have a long-lasting impact on how responsible gambling messaging changes.

In the meantime, there have been efforts to pass legislation that would ban sports betting temporarily in the United States and suspend betting advertisements in specific time slots.

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