This year, the 2nd annual 22q at the Zoo Worldwide Awareness Day was held on April 22nd at more than 60 locations around the world! While there were hundreds of families at zoos around the globe, in New England, zoos are not usually open in April. So Lisa Jennings, whose daughter Monica has 22q, started looking at indoor venues. Meanwhile, her nephew, Scot, and his friend, Travis, were looking to complete their high school senior project and thought about doing something about 22q11 Deletion Syndrome which would be different and help them better understand the issues faced by their classmate, cousin/friend, and Lisa’s daughter, Monica. Their focus was to involve youth and young adults in an awareness campaign that would reach a lot of people. Facebook was a natural choice. Getting others involved simply by playing games was also an easy choice. In online gaming when you make achievements in the game, a message gets posted to your own facebook page drawing friends to join in for the cause.

When they discovered Zoo World 2, they contacted Rock You Inc, the creators of Zoo World 2, just to let them know of their plans to try to get anyone not at a zoo to play Zoo World 2 on the 22nd to raise awareness. They ran with it and got their development team working on ideas. Now, whenever a player enters the game on the 22nd, a message about 22q11 is displayed. And a unique 22q monument appears and gives rewards… they had 200k facebook feeds and generated 30k clicks into the game.

There is also an in-game pop-up to tell players about upcoming 22q events, like the recent International 22q11 Deletion Syndrome Conference at Disney World, Florida and 22q Week at Dragonfly Forest Camp.
The game is reaching thousands of players of all ages in one day, every month. Help spread the word and PLAYtoday!!