Marketing Retrospective from my Charity Bundle

First things first, here is the pitch for the bundle in case anyone hasn't seen it yet.

🎲 HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle for Legal Aid is Live! 🎲

Earlier this year, the HELLO//GOODBYE team, with multiple volunteers based in Vienna, designed and printed 100 zines and raised over $3,700 for legal aid in Virginia - more than double their original goal. Now, HELLO//GOODBYE is going digital, and it’s open to players all around the world!

 

From now until November 5th, you can pick up the HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle for Legal Aid on itch.io. Inside you’ll find 203 games by 114 creators, making the bundle a treasure trove of tabletop RPGs, video games, and experimental gems. 

 

Some are ENNIE award-winners, like Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast by Possum Creek Games, others are games by favorites like snow, who has two games in the bundle (Songbirds and Lilancholy), and many are fresh works waiting for you to discover them!

 

The bundle is on itch.io for only $12. Every dollar goes directly to the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society and the Legal Aid Justice Center, two Virginia-based non-profits that provide free legal help to people facing eviction, deportation, and other horrific legal problems. 

 

The clock is ticking! We’ve already raised $17,000, help us get to $20,000 before time runs out!

 

💸 $12

👾 203 games

⏰ Available until November 5th, 11:59 CEST.

👉 Get the HELLO//GOODBYE Bundle here!

 

Ok, pitch over. The rest of this blog post will be a reflection on some of my favorite marketing moments from the bundle, in no particular order. I must admit that I'm kinda a nerd about marketing (with the caveat of exclusively being interested in marketing for non-profits and other good causes). In college when I founded the mural festival, I got pretty creative. I remember approaching the weird people on campus protesting against abortion to ask them where they had their signs printed and geeking out with my Marketing major friend about the potential for advertising on car rims (we did not do this). This project was not quite so far off the beaten track, but it's been cool to implement and experiment with different strategies for getting the bundle out there, and I hope it's interesting for you all to read about as well.

Cool Moment 1 - Why We Do This (And Our First Earned Media!)

Let's start strong. This was probably the best moment of all, receiving this comment about the bundle. It was so meaningful to hear about the real-world impact of all our hard work, and, from a marketing perspective, I really geeked out because we hadn't been the ones to post about the bundle on r/rpg. It was great to see us be mentioned in the wild, and one of my favorite feelings was tracking down all those instances when someone would get linked to the bundle from a page I didn't expect. (Which by the way, Itch doesn't have great metrics for that, so if I were to do this again, I'd love to experiment with link shorteners or other tools to be able to better track where click-throughs came from.)

The article they're referencing is available here: https://www.wvtf.org/news/2025-10-03/virginia-legal-team-wins-one-for-immigrants-locked-up-by-ice. This comment had me on cloud 9 for days after receiving it, and there were a few others by Richmonders who were grateful for the attention that the bundle was putting on the city.

Cool Moment 2 - Press Etc. Coverage

Seeing the bundle's press release live on Rascal News! It was great to see our name mentioned in Rascal, and I'm hoping that it won't be the last time. If I were to do something like this again, I think I'd like to cultivate relationships with reporters and try to arrange an interview, since this time around we submitted our press release to the community announcements section of the website. But regardless I was very grateful to Alex for taking the lead on that, and we earned several sales from the announcement.

 

Another highlight was getting mentioned in Thomas Manuel's Indie RPG newsletter, which was both personally cool since I'm a fan and net us several sales as well. Originally we submitted a short text about the bundle to the newsletter as an ad, which I think he very kindly didn't charge us for, and then the week after he mentioned us in the body of the newsletter! Considering I read that newsletter nearly every week, it definitely felt like a milestone to make it there.

  

There were several other well-known places that we were mentioned in, including Enworld, the Soloist newsletter, the Seed of Worlds blog, and the Chaotican Writer newsletter. Most of that was earned media, which was really nice. 

I do also want to do a special shout out Will from the Seed of Worlds blog for mentioning us in several of his weekly link round ups AND reviewing the bundle as well. 

 

AND I somehow hadn't even noticed that he'd written a review of our print magazine as well all the way back in July! (I think at the time I was probably busy being sick with Covid and dogsitting for an insane puppy.) But nevermind all that. The point is: all hail Will. Good friend.

Cool Moment 3 - Memes
Someone posted a meme about my bundle on reddit! And then the mods removed it for some reason! But it made me laugh regardless! And it got us at least a sale or two because someone posted the bundle link in the comment section.

 

We did then make some memes of our own to do guerilla marketing with, but honestly I didn't follow up about it as much as I should have. If I were to run something like this again I'd love to prioritize this strategy just to experiment and test how well it works.

Two of the memes my friend Ryn made for our guerilla marketing.
 

Cool Moment 4 - Social Media 

Seeing the cool graphics my friend Meghan made for our social media, which we posted on Bluesky and Instagram. Unfortunately Instagram changed its default dimensions mid-fundraiser, cutting off the edges of the graphics until you click on an actual post, but the templates were still sick as hell so we stuck with them. It was so cool to see my own collages turned into borders. 

The hope was that by featuring different games in carousels and threads we would inspire the various creators we were shouting out to reshare the bundle. I think this and our overall social media strategy worked, especially on Bluesky, where I had been developing a decent network of other game designers when I was recruiting for the bundle. Our Instagram, however, started the bundle sale with only like 30 followers because I was really only using it as a finsta account. So although we gained a few followers through the bundle, the Instagram account probably wasn't really being used to its full potential.

I will say, I was also quite fond of the graphics we made for each of the dollar amount milestones. This is a screenshot of the Swan and Raven Studio Instagram page. So pretty!

 

Social media is awful and I don't really use Instagram myself very much anymore, so it feels weird to be excited about something social media-adjacent, but all the color and life on that page does make me really happy. I also want to say that I'm so appreciative of everyone who shared and reposted the bundle on social media, since there were many. And a special shout out to Adéla for being a marketing and social media queen with me. I really couldn't have done any of this without her help. Ily queen <3

Oh, I should mention, we also shared the bundle on various Discord servers and subreddits. This wasn't a super organized strategy, however. Or rather, I had intended it to be, but honestly, I just didn't have the energy to follow up with my volunteers about it as much as I would have liked to. I'll talk about this more at the end.

 

Cool Moment 5 - Podcast

Alex interviewed me for his podcast! Once I got over the jump scare of hearing my own voice, I was so excited to listen to the podcast episode that Alex made for the bundle. The episode was recorded over the summer and is mostly about the physical zine (of which he contributed to!), but Alex frames it so that it touches on the bundle as well. I felt bad that the audio quality from my end ended up being so low quality, but he really made it work. If you haven't yet, by the way, you should check out his podcast; he's interviewed a lot of different game designers about their design process (and his own game that he works on throughout the first season is available in print form now!)

 

 

Cool Moment 6 - Itch Home Page

This was actually one of the first moments of the bundle, but it was such a nice feeling to see our bundle on the home page of Itch when it first appeared there. I was really concerned about making sure this happened, and Itch obliged and made sure it did.

 

Being on the front page drove a vast majority of our sales; there's no way we would have been able to raise nearly this much money without it. If you look at the analytics for the bundle, it's overwhelmingly from people buying via the home page. 

 

Imagine 60 pages of this on repeat and that's close to the experience with how our sales went. I would say that I would have appreciated better analytics if Itch could provide them; sometimes the analytics would say that someone clicked through via, for example, reddit.com but not give any additional details about what subreddit or post mentioned us, and then I would go down a rabbithole of trying to reverse-engineer and find who had mentioned us. So not quite optimal for analytics. But all things considered, Itch were very helpful and responsive partners during the actual process before we went live. I won't go too much into it, but it was a very stressful week right before we launched, and Itch were able to assist me in making sure everything was ready in time.

 

Cool Moment 7 and Conclusion- Game Store(s) and Making Do

This was definitely the strategy that I ended up feeling most ambivalent about. Friends of mine did a lot of work to get the contact details for game stores in Richmond, Vienna, and Charlotte, but in the end we didn't end up contacting them other than simply posting in their Discord servers. The plan was to design a poster, email it to the stores with location-specific context, and ask them to print and hang it up in their shops. Earlier this week (aka pretty freaking last minute) I asked in person at Your Local Game Store, where I do some paid DMing, and they printed and hung up the poster, but that was about it in terms of execution for this strategy. I feel bad that folks' work wasn't put to good use (at least for this project), but at a certain point, I just ran out of steam. And that's okay.

In truth, this was a behemoth of a project. Originally intended to go live in July, it took several additional months to onboard both non-profits, and in the meantime I moved continents, got Covid, was on the job hunt, filed for my LLC, and had summer vacations. And then the day before I started my full-time job, I got notice from Itch that the bundle would be ready to go live in less than a week. Which meant I had 5 days to get 114 game designers to approve the bundle, all while starting a new job at the same time. Uf! 

There were other minor complications. Because things were so delayed, some friends who had originally intended to volunteer very understandably could no longer commit as much time and energy! Because months had passed and they had other responsibilities! I completely understood and felt it was a shame, but I think all things considered we made do with flying colors. One thing I always know how to do is rope unsuspecting friends into a good old fashioned scheme, so I was able to fill any potential gaps with other friends/volunteers/victims. But it was additional work on the recruiting side.

Starting a fulltime job the week before the bundle went live meant my energy during the bundle was understandably split, and to be fair there's always more to do or things you could or should have done better. Part of the process is just accepting that. But ultimately I'm really proud of what we accomplished. The original goal was $10,000, and with 4 days to go, we've nearly doubled that. Athough I hope we hit that magic $20,000 amount, I think I can rest easy. I'm looking forward to saying goodbye to HELLO//GOODBYE, and hello to some well-deserved rest!

 P.S. buy the bundle: https://itch.io/b/3276/hellogoodbye-charity-bundle-for-legal-aid