Red flowers as media, working together to build dreams – Tencent’s ＂One Flower, One Dream＂ Review of Internet Sustainable Public Welfare

Our reporter, Liu Pengcheng

On September 5, the seventh "China Charity Day" arrived as promised. This year’s focus is on the theme of "Join hands to do charity and spread the truth, goodness and beauty".

A few days ago, the General Office of the Ministry of Civil Affairs issued a notice to mobilize and guide the public to widely participate in charitable activities, carry forward the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation of helping each other and being kind, advocate "everyone is good" and "everyone does good", and deepen the foundation of charitable culture.

As a well-known Internet fundraising information platform, Tencent Charity aggregates more than 10,000 charitable organizations in China, and its "99 Charity Day" and the Internet public welfare model it has spawned are profoundly changing the way we do public welfare.

Under the high-level operation situation, "99 Public Welfare Day" has entered its eighth year. Tencent has innovatively launched the "One Flower, One Dream" Internet sustainable public welfare model, advocating that the public "use small safflower to do good deeds together", so that each real and vivid public welfare dream becomes a reality, and it is expected to set up the industry vane again.

Gathering safflower to build a dream together

"99 Charity Day" has attracted much attention. Since September 1, 2,500 charitable organizations and 10,000 public welfare projects have been meeting the public one after another. Tencent Charity Foundation will provide 300 million yuan in matching donations and set up 100 million yuan in special incentive funds to support more growth and innovative public welfare projects, and "do good deeds together" with everyone. If nothing else, the "carnival" of Internet public welfare will be staged again.

"Little Honghua" was created in 2018 with the original intention of recording users’ public welfare behavior, "so that every small good deed can be seen and inspired", and now it has been given a richer public welfare connotation. "One Flower One Dream" first launched the public to create a public welfare interaction mechanism, amplifying the voice of the demand side. Jin Jinping, a professor at Peking University, believes: "It goes with the public, stimulates the goodness that the public already has in their hearts, and has a certain degree of social innovation."

How to determine the dream? This year’s "99 Public Welfare Day", the majority of netizens can use the little safflower to "vote" for public welfare propositions and help the public welfare dream. Since the end of June, Tencent has received more than 8,000 dream plans. In the end, the platform selected 16 public welfare dreams such as "Music rehabilitation class to support 300 hearing-impaired children" "Training 1,000 first responders to protect life for children" "Hearing screening for 10,000 rural elderly" "Aerospace science education for 10,000 rural children", which were launched during the "99 Public Welfare Day".

Who will build the dream? The upgraded "Little Safflower" is not only a public welfare account record, but also a medium that continuously helps the circulation and relay of love, further lowering the threshold of public welfare and integrating it into everyone’s daily work and life scenes. The public accumulates the Little Safflower "love account" through public welfare activities, and then donates the Little Safflower to the designated public welfare dream (issue). This is a new way to play, and it is also a public welfare interaction mechanism for co-creation – every caring user can become a "dream partner", use the Little Safflower collected by himself, advocate the social issues he cares about and help it become a public welfare project, and can initiate "donation together" to gather more people to participate in dream building.

How to pool resources? Co-creation and co-construction is a two-way process. The 16 dreams launched this year are participated in and co-created to varying degrees by all businesses of Tencent. Little Safflower has become a medium and an open system. Tencent’s businesses can attract users to do public welfare in their own scenarios, and all public welfare actions can be realized in the business’s own scenarios.

How to give feedback to public welfare? After the "99 Public Welfare Day", the public welfare dream of donating flowers to reach the minimum execution amount will be turned into a public welfare project. Tencent Charity Foundation will make it a reality through innovative funding, and regularly report the implementation progress to the public. When a user donates a flower in September, it is expected to receive the first feedback at the end of November and the beginning of December. The progress of the project will be reported in stages as concrete and user-perceivable as possible. In this way, the public will gradually feel that even donating a flower can make people far away better, thus having a lasting motivation to do public welfare.

Public welfare iteration acceleration

In 2007, Tencent Charity Foundation, China’s first public welfare foundation initiated by an Internet company, was established; in 2015, China’s first Internet public welfare day – "99 Charity Day" was born; in 2021, Tencent Sustainable Social Value Division (SSV) was established, and "99 Charity Day" launched the "Common Prosperity" theme matching day…

This is the condensed path of Tencent Charity’s 15-year development. It can be said that it has witnessed the flourishing road of China’s Internet public welfare. "The Internet public welfare model represented by ’99 Public Welfare Day ‘has iterated China’s public welfare to version 3.0," said Zhang Nan, a professor at the Institute of Public Welfare and Philanthropy of Tsinghua University. And the new public welfare method represented by "one flower and one dream" is driving the iteration to accelerate.

This represents a huge shift in the concept of Tencent Charity. In the past, Tencent Charity’s most used concept expression was "public welfare for everyone". The establishment of SSV has made the public welfare concept of "public welfare users as the center" a more sustainable goal. For more than a year, Tencent Charity has been thinking more about how to cultivate long-term and rational public welfare users, and how to use Tencent’s scientific and technological capabilities to improve the execution ability of public welfare organizations and solve specific social problems.

This reflects the transformation of Tencent Charity’s value pursuit. Using the Internet platform to raise funds, gather the love and warmth of all walks of life, and make the charity cake bigger and bigger is an important mission of charity, but Tencent Charity realizes that the amount of fundraising is important, and healthy fundraising is even more important.

This has given birth to the innovation of Tencent Charity’s operation and maintenance model. This year’s "99 Charity Day" infiltrates the concept of public welfare "co-creation" into all aspects of the event, hoping to design more scenarios and opportunities, link more social forces to participate in public welfare, attract ordinary users to enter the public welfare, and become a member of the public welfare ecology. Relying on the "Little Safflower" system, Tencent Charity has opened up the pattern, allowing Tencent’s various businesses to attract users to do public welfare in their own scenarios; Little Safflower, as an honor system, has also connected various social businesses. For example, green travel with a ride code can get Little Safflower, and green business travel can also get Little Safflower without changing bed sheets every day in hotels… This kind of public welfare expansion and co-creation is building a public welfare and charity reputation system.

The "Little Safflower" system has created a beautiful image: public welfare participants gather their goodwill, and every time they do a good deed, the "Little Safflower" will automatically grow. Over time, the "Little Safflower" will gradually thrive and flourish, and the concept of public welfare will become more and more deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.

Digital public good governance

In recent years, digital philanthropy, as a new thing, has increasingly demonstrated its tenacious vitality and appeal. At the same time, the state attaches great importance to bringing together digital philanthropy, lists digital philanthropy as a key task in the construction of network civilization, and continues to promote digital philanthropy to take new steps.

"One flower, one dream" is a test of Tencent Charity’s "course" calibration. Under the "public welfare user-centered" digital public welfare governance concept, many changes are taking place subtly.

Last year, Tencent implemented its fourth strategic upgrade, taking "promoting sustainable social value innovation" as the foundation for the company’s development. Not long ago, SSV clarified its positioning as an explorer of technology to help society benefit. Over the past year or so, it has trained rural revitalization management talents, built emergency response systems, and developed "invisible caregivers" to solve the elderly care problem… In the end, they found that these issues are deeply embedded in social entities. To really make results, the most practical way is to use technology and innovation to create with society. This idea is also the logic behind "one flower and one dream".

In the development of public welfare undertakings, speed and efficiency need to be balanced. Tencent Charity pursues a safer and more sustainable development path, with both "braking" and "shifting gears to speed up", rather than unilaterally pursuing the scale and speed of public welfare financing. In the exploration of social issues, more emphasis is placed on maintaining "determination", paying more patience and pragmatism, crossing the river by feeling the stones, running through the pilot, and then finding some models, and then promoting and improving them on a larger scale.

In the development of digital public welfare, it extends to the level of ecological governance. "One flower and one dream" seems to be an improvement of the rules of play, but it actually highlights the vision of Tencent’s social enterprise development: co-creation, co-construction and sharing, focusing more on the origin of user value, technological innovation and social responsibility, and more adhering to the vision of science and technology for the good, so as to help the Internet public welfare ecosystem become more diverse, healthy and sustainable. As Pony Ma, founder of Tencent, said: "Do these difficult and correct things, and promote social co-creation with long-term determination to create sustainable social value."

We see that Tencent is taking philanthropy as an important aspect of creating social value, and integrating it into the whole process of corporate development strategy, business development, and daily operations. What is even more commendable is that Tencent Charity has leveraged its own advantages, highlighted the characteristics of the industry, fully mobilized and pooled resources from all aspects, strengthened the innovation of philanthropy models and product design, and strived to create a number of creative, distinctive and influential digital philanthropy brands such as "99 Charity Day" and "One Flower and One Dream", so that the achievements of Internet development can better benefit the people and society.