Salesforce Volunteers Raise Money for Children’s Hospital with Gaming Fundraiser

After almost a year of planning and over 1,000 cumulative man-hours, a handful of Salesforce employees from various groups inside Salesforce’s engineering organization, InfraEng (formerly TechOps), came together in 2015 for an awesome and geeky idea: “Embrace the inherently philanthropic nature of our tech company, through our shared mutual love of video games.”

The team, dubbed “FragForce“, coordinated a 24-hour gaming stream event to fundraise for the video game charity organization Extra-Life, each of us picking a specific Children’s Hospital of the Kings Daughters to assist. For me, it was also personal. The Norfolk Children’s Hospital that I chose to fundraise for, donated critical care to me as an infant when my parents couldn’t pay, saving my life. This was a chance to finally give back.

Almost three dozen Salesforce employees (and twenty guests), took over every single conference room in our Salesforce Herndon office’s first floor, and brought gaming desktop computers, consoles, and board games, to be video streamed out to the internet via Twitch.tv in cooperation with the local charity gaming group, WASD Online. For many of us, this was a sentimental reminder of our younger days, when we gathered friend groups together in the same room (sometimes lugging gigantic gaming desktops), to socially play videogames.

Fragforce 2015 raised more than $6,500 in our campaign and 24-hour stream, with WASD Online bringing in another $1,000 for a total of $7,500. Our Salesforce employees contributed over 500 VTO hours in one weekend! The story’s next exciting chapter, is the Fragforce team’s proposal to package this charity gaming experience up and hit the road, bringing it to remote offices and Salesforce HQ.