Tencent Gongyi

A charitable crowdfunding web app in WeChat

2015-2016

Tencent Gongyi is a charitable crowdfunding mobile service for users to contribute and support crowdfunding campaigns hosted by charitable organisation. The service is one of the built-in web app within WeChat Pay wallet, which is an accessible path to encourage micro-donations.

WeChat Web app

With around one billion daily active users, WeChat is the must-have app in China. Users in China use WeChat for messaging, social networking and payment everyday. The mobile web app charitable crowdfunding service creates an immediate path to encourage donations by the sharing web links around user’s WeChat network.

My Role

Define the overall design strategy, interaction design and design resource management, collaborate with project team, designers and developers to drive the final design implementation.

How does it work

People who need help and want to initiate charitable crowdfunding can simply provide proof documents, set fundraising goal, and apply on web platform. Once the campaign has been reviewed and recognised by any of the charity organisation, it will be published on the platform and open to public for donation. Users who make donation will receive the project updates pushed by WeChat notification so they can keep following up the campaign status.

initiate Group support

Other than making donation by individual, we designed the feature to let users use their social influences to ask more friends support the charity campaign. Users can initiate the group donation page by editing the project title/photos and setting the fundraising goal. After that, the created page can be shared to their WeChat groups or Moments for crowdfunding.

Hike for charity

Hike for charity is feature encouraging users walking more and transferring users’s walking steps to charitable fund sponsored by corporates. Different from donating money, the design was more focus on donating steps directly. Since users can only donate their steps once a day, we show the progress and goal at the page center to encourage people walk more steps.

Campaigns Design

BIGGEST Charity EVENT in CHINA

In 9th Sep 2015,  Tencent held the first double nine charity event on mobile WeChat and QQ, which is the first and largest charitable crowdfunding campaign in China. I lead the team design WeChat Moments advertisement, mobile and desktop campaign websites. more than 2 millions users participated in this event. The participated charity organisations raised over than 1 billion RMB in 57 hours.

Challenges

In this charity event, 12 different charity programs are selected to get Tencent foundation’s support and got promoted by WeChat Moments ad. The programs were across environmental, health, education, poverty, and culture five different types of charities. How to propose one single persuasive design which can cater for the different charity program was a big challenge. By interviewing our users, we found that donors are more willing to give supports on those programs which explain where will the money go and how will the money being used clearly.

FIRST WECHAT Moments ad DESIGN

WeChat audio message is the one of the most popular feature used by users. Instead of typing, people in China like press the button and record their voice when sending message to others. When people receive any audio message, they are used to tap the bar and listen the audios immediately. Based on this behaviour, in order to trigger the curiosity, we designed our WeChat ad by imitating the audio message bar instead of showing our concept directly at the front.

after the first big success

Out of the total 2 millions total participants, 81.76% of them are new users and made their first donation in our platform, which was a great successful starting point. Following by the first great charity event in 2015, Tencent hosted many other campaigns in the following years. During Chinese New Year in 2016, we made another WeChat Moments ad to encouraged people to give to charities.

Making changes in the new year

As new year meaning the new calendar year begins, we came out the concept of “changes” that have been done by charities in the past year and encourage users start to make changes in the new year.

The slogan “Say goodbye to the past and move forward” brings out the web page design showing how charities change people’s lives. By collecting the real number of people who were suffered from poverty in rural village and the number of people who got supports, we presented the before and after number in the design. Meanwhile to make the changes more visible, I worked with photographer and interview those kids who received the charities support. Their photos and short videos were presented together with the numbers to create impressive impact at the page design.

> See my next work: Tourism Service Design in Southwest China Village