BGC touts success of SGW 2023 with 50m social media impressions

Safer Gambling Week 2023 has been hailed as a major success by the Betting and Gaming Council, a trade body in the United Kingdom which balances the needs of the industry and government-led initiatives looking to regulate the sector, and also one of the hosts of the initiative.

Safer Gambling Week celebrated a major milestone this year, with the event which took place between November 13-19, generating 50m impressions across various social media channels, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

All in all, this is a significant increase in the numbers of last year and has seen the campaign celebrated as a major success by not just the BGC, but also lawmakers, consumer bodies, and the industry.

BGC CEO Michael Dugher welcomed SGW as a huge success in promoting the values of responsible gambling and raising awareness for gambling tools that consumers can use to safeguard against gambling-related harm.

"It is proven that the success of the campaign leads to increased use of popular safer gambling tools - like time-outs and deposit limits - that only exist in the regulated industry," Dugher said and added that the initiative made it possible to inform millions of people about responsible gambling.

BGC is one of the bodies hosting Safer Gambling Week, along with BACTA and the Bingo Association. The campaign sought to broach the topic of safe and responsible gambling on a national level and ensure that the tenets of responsible play in gambling are indeed upheld by the sector’s biggest companies.

More importantly, the campaign similarly focused on informing consumers about the dangers of gambling and how they can steer clear of those or, conversely, how they can seek help from official sources should they already be suffering from gambling-related harm.

The BGC insists that the number of problem gambling among adults in England is 0.4%, a data set that has been disputed by various stakeholders. Casino Guru News also partook in promoting Safer Gambling Week this year, with the publication running extensive coverage.

We interviewed a number of companies in our "Voice of the Industry" piece in which we offered a scoop of what gambling companies think about Safer Gambling Week. We similarly conducted a webinar with several prominent gambling harm and problem gambling experts, as part of our webinar series, All Things Gambling: "Customer care in the gambling industry – Gambling-harm prevention."

The Casino Guru Awards, a new industry format for awarding companies' efforts across various parts of the experience, also features a significant focus on RG and social responsibility.

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