The third annual “9/9 Philanthropy Day” online charity event will take place from the 7th to the 9th of September this year. Over 120 fundraising organizations and 6,700 charitable programs will participate in the event through both online and offline channels. One of the founders of Tencent and the Tencent Charity Foundation (腾讯公益慈善基金会, the Tencent Foundation in brief), Honorary President Chen Yidan, announced that this year the Tencent Foundation plans to contribute 299.99 million Yuan in donations. The total amount of donations is expected to reach around 600 million Yuan, including 309 million Yuan coming from over 300 social groups.
The 9/9 Philanthropy Day was established in 2015 by initiative of the Tencent Foundation, and launched with the support of hundreds of charitable organizations, well-known enterprises and celebrities. It has the Bureau of Online Social Work of the Office of the Central Leading Group for Cyberspace Affairs (中央网信办网络社会工作局) as its guiding government department. Last year’s edition raised 300 million Yuan from 6.8 million users.
In order to increase public trust, this year the Tencent Charity platform established a new program called the “transparency package”, which defines the information that NPOs should reveal to the public to promote transparency in the use of donations. The information that the NPOs have to reveal includes the quantity of the donations, the expenses data and the executive reports. Organizations which neglect to reveal the information as requested will not be allowed to participate in the event. As Chen Yidan says, “we hope that through the popularity of our transparency package the concepts of openness and transparency can become the consensus within the sector, and revealing an organization’s financial status and executive information to the public can become a standard; this is a good way to build up a more open and transparent public internet ecosystem”.
This year’s 9/9 Philanthropy Day will include a variety of different programs, including offline enterprise charity activities, online charity games and sports charity. These combinations of different activities are supposed to help a culture of charity spread into different areas of people’s lives.
