This year’s “9/9 Philanthropy Day”, the third one held so far, generated a total of over 1.3 billion Yuan in donations, including 829.9 million Yuan from the public, 299.99 million Yuan from the Tencent Foundation and 177 million Yuan from social enterprises, according to figures published by Tencent itself. This represents a very significant increase over last year’s edition.
Within the three days the activity took place, from September 7 to 9, a total of 829.9 million Yuan in donations from 12.68 million donors was raised through the Tencent Charity platform, making contributions to around 6,466 charitable projects in the areas of educational assistance, medical assistance, poverty alleviation and more. Last year’s edition raised 300 million Yuan from 6.77 million donors.
One of the founders of Tencent and of the Tencent Charity Foundation (腾讯公益慈善基金会), Honorary President Chen Yidan, said: “it is pleasing to see that philanthropic activities have become a part of Chinese people’s life, and people can do charity both online and offline through a variety of ways; doing charity now is more of a lifestyle than a matter of just making donations.”
Ma Huateng, Chairman of the board and CEO of Tencent; and Liu Zhiping, the president of Tencent, stated in an opening letter: “the ‘9/9 Philanthropy Day’ has promoted the public’s awareness and enthusiasm for getting involved in charitable activities. Philanthropy Day has now become an important event not only for the charity sector, but also for the whole of society.”
For this year’s Philanthropy Day, the Tencent Charity platform also established a “transparency package” program which requires the non-profits to reveal their donation data on the platform, in order to promote transparency in their use of donations. As the secretary-general of the Tencent Foundation Zhai Hongxin concluded, “the real function of the ‘9/9 Philanthropy Day’ is to increase the positive influence of charitable organizations and projects, therefore providing more transparency regarding the donations can improve public trust and get more people to participate in the charitable activities.”
