Streaming Success Meets Social Impact

“This sounds cheesy, but it's more like a friendship,” says Rachel Romero, SVP of Marketing at the independent storytelling and media company Critical Role and a board member of the Critical Role Foundation, which is a longtime partner of Comic Relief US/Red Nose Day. “It’s more like, ‘We're in this together. We're doing it together’. We collaborate hand in hand, and we’re doing the dance together.”

We at Comic Relief US feel the exact same way about Romero and the Critical Role Foundation (CRF). [insert linked hands emoji] Since 2019, in collaboration with the CRF, we’ve engaged Critical Role’s enthusiastic tabletop role-playing game community to raise over $1.1 million. And we’ve done so primarily through three innovative campaigns – in fact, the 2022 version won a Gold Honor and an Audience Honor from the Shorty Impact Awards — thanks to a surprising and winning blend of role-playing games, audience participation, and a bit of star power (including everyone’s favorite Dungeons & Dragons and Tolkien fan, Stephen Colbert).  

We chatted with Rachel Romero, SVP of Marketing at Critical Role, to learn more about CRF’s approach to philanthropy, how their dream of bringing Stephen Colbert and Red Nose Day together became a reality, and which results truly matter to them when it comes to impact.

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Q: How did the Critical Role Foundation come about, and how does it decide who or what to support?

A: We officially launched the Critical Role Foundation (CRF) in the fall of 2020. [At Critical Role,] we are a group of actors, creatives, and professionals who believe in storytelling. We believe in the power of gaming to accomplish great things. But we are not experts at solving the world's problems, and we decided to leverage the expertise and passion of nonprofits like CRUS/Red Nose Day [to do it]. They have boots on the ground; they know the communities they're serving and what they need the most. So we picked a group of organizations that were meaningful to us. One of the things that was important to us at CRF was to fill in the gaps too – learning who and where are the places that are forgotten and are not getting a lot of attention from donors and how we can support them. Red Nose Day has always been – and Comic Relief as a whole – an organization that's been incredibly important to us because it stems from performance and entertainment and using the arts and entertainment platform as a way to do good. That’s intrinsically why we have CRF and why our connection with them makes so much sense. 

Q: When it comes to building successful charitable partnerships, what characteristics stand out to you? 

A: When I think about all my key contacts at our partner organizations, there is this unparalleled passion for the work that they do. It's almost like a vibe, like you meet someone, and you know right away, Your heart is in this, you really care about children, you really care about LGBTQIA issues, you really care about XYZ thing. People who are really excellent at doing nonprofit work are selfless, to some degree, and I think they understand the level of sacrifice that comes along with trying to help the greater good. There's also something about the way we've been able to create community with our partners that I think is really important. This sounds cheesy, but it's more like a friendship. It’s more like, We're in this together. We collaborate hand in hand, and we’re doing the dance together. 

Q: Much of the success of our partnership stems from Choose Their Adventure style virtual fundraising campaigns. We’ve been lucky to have Stephen Colbert, Tony Hale and Sam Richardson participate over the years. Can you tell us more about the development of these campaigns?  

A: Well, we've had Stephen Colbert on our wish list for a long time. He's been very vocal about his love of Dungeons and Dragons and all things Lord of the Rings and Tolkien. At Critical Role, we can identify who our people are – the uber nerds – and we want to invite them to our table, [to] play games with them. Finding that commonality is always so fun. ‍I was approached in 2019 by Michael [Wasserman], who's the CEO of Tiltify. Tiltify is a fundraising software that a ton of streamers use. He was like, “Hey, I think it would be really cool if we ran a fundraising campaign with Red Nose Day and had the audience vote on what the adventure would be.” And I was like, “I love that idea.” [But] actually, we try not to do a lot of that, just because it can go off the rails really quickly. Whenever you allow the internet the ability to make choices and shape something, chaos can completely reign. But it allowed us the ability to step outside what we’d normally do and have fun. As we started planning the campaign and started to work with Red Nose Day, we got Stephen Colbert that first year. Talk about a career highlight. And he was just the nicest human. 

Q: And we’ve now gone on to do three fundraisers! What do you think makes them such a success?

‍A: We raised so much money for Red Nose Day through both our games with Stephen and also in our third game with Tony Hale and Sam Robinson. It's phenomenal. So for us, if we can bring that promotional arm, the story, our talent, and we can join forces with [talent that supports] Red Nose Day like Sam and Tony and Stephen, their promotional arm and their expertise on the ground, it feels like we can shoot for the moon every single time. It really feels like almost anything is possible. 

Q:  That's amazing. How much does it change from year to year? Does it feel like you're launching a spaceship every single year? 

‍A: I feel like we're launching a spaceship every year, every single iteration has been different and it's just gotten better. That first game that we did with Stephen was wonderful. I loved it; I have not seen a lot of one-on-one games being played on camera. That first game, we only had Stephen for a short amount of time and we weren't able to bring everybody else, so it was really just Matthew [Mercer, Critical Role Chief Creative Officer, Founder and Game Master, and CRF Board Member] walking Stephen through a mini-adventure that was shaped by all of the donations from our audience. Being able to see those two just riff off of each other and create a story together was incredible. The second time, we were able to go to New York and see Stephen, we had him for a much longer time, and we brought three other people to flesh out the adventuring party with him. With our latest and greatest Choose Their Adventure one-shot with Tony Hale and Sam Richardson, because we shot in LA, we were able to welcome them into our studio. We were on our home turf, and our set in our studio was inspired by Disney Imagineering. The way that set could immerse you based on what was going on in the campaign was wild.

Q: With charity campaigns, how do you make sure that it comes across as genuine and engaging as opposed to doing it because it looks good?

‍A: When you're making content on the internet, in a lot of cases it's dictated by analytics and algorithms. When the show first started streaming in 2015, the optimal content length for YouTube and Twitch was maybe five minutes or under. Who was going to watch this four-hour show? Very few people were watching people play role-playing games on the internet. We were also starting at 7 PM Pacific, which is a bad time zone for long-form content; it’s already 10 o'clock on the East Coast, and it’s the middle of the night in the UK. It just should not have worked, right? And it took off. All of us, especially the founders, were like, “This shouldn't be a thing. How do we give back?” Our giving is a way for us to reflect all of this success and luck we’ve had back—not just to the audience that watches our show but also [to] our domestic and global community.