Charities in China are tapping into a sense of community among the country’s growing social media users

Social media in China looks a bit different from how it looks in the west. Thanks to the Great Firewall there’s no Facebook or Twitter, but there are Chinese equivalents, most notably Weibo.

Microblogging is an awesome force on the Chinese internet – 30% of Chinese internet users access Weibo (a similar market penetration to Twitter’s in the US) and it has more than 300 million registered users with about 100m messages being posted each day.

Weibo, run by the Chinese online media group Sina, has come into its own for many reasons – it helped spread concern about issues the government would rather not see promoted, such as the Bo Xilai scandal and the Wenzhou high speed train crash in 2011. But it has also been used to stir up nationalist sentiment recently around the Diaoyu Islands and the dispute with Japan.

The government monitors it, interferes occasionally and makes all users register so it can know who is saying what. But, by Chinese standards, it often feels like a free-for-all town meeting.

And it’s not just Weibo. There are other microblogging platforms with high user numbers. The big new name in the market has been WeChat, which has a reported 200 million users. There’s a lot of overlap across all the systems with messages flying around on multiple platforms and cross-posting.

In among all these users are a bunch of Chinese and foreign corporations as well as a host of NGOs, activist groups and concerned individuals. People are starting to learn how to use social media to raise money for charities or promote social awareness.

Chinese government departments are involved, too. During a nationwide tuberculosis prevention campaign earlier this year all TB prevention officers across China established their own Weibo feeds so they could reach remote rural areas to raise awareness of the disease. Similarly, activists used Weibo to raise awareness of World No Tobacco Day this year with 1,500 volunteers and 50 showbiz celebrities Weibo-ing anti-smoking messages to all and sundry.

Charities are learning to use microblogging. An independent initiative to provide free school lunches to poor rural “left behind” kids has raised the equivalent of more than £1.8m from connected Chinese urbanites and been widely praised in the domestic media. Deng Fei, a former investigative journalist who set up the site, solicits donations of just three yuan (less than 30p) to pay for lunch for a poverty-stricken rural child.

900,000 donors

Deng has travelled the country (and its internet) talking up his scheme and the use of social media. He says: “In eight months, we raised $4m in funds; 900,000 people gave us money. We’ve helped 162 schools to give free lunches to 25,000 children.”

Noticing how active charities were on Weibo, the site has launched a charitable philanthropy platform (gongyi.weibo.com), which aims to bring together individuals in need with charitable individuals and organisations. The platform’s content is divided into five categories: charity education, child assistance, medical care, animal protection, and environmental protection.

Charities describe the projects they’re promoting, name a formal proposer (to improve transparency), and state their project’s goals and fundraising targets. Charities must be officially registered and all monies are donated via Sina’s official Weibo charity account. Donors can remain anonymous or display their certified donations and receive “compassion points”. All donations are made via the long-established and generally well-trusted local third-party payment processor Alipay, and funds are dispersed in partnership with the China Youth Development Foundation, a government-linked body.

Regular readers of this column will know how severely dented the reputation of China’s charity sector has been since the high point of the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake appeals. Many believe that systems such as Weibo and WeChat can re-energise the sector, restore much-needed trust through adding transparency and regulation, while bringing a younger generation to the notion of charity. Many of those giving to social-media-generated charities, like the school lunch programme, say they feel closely connected to groups that use social media – that it’s a more personal and private act than putting money in a box.

Foreign companies in China have traditionally used microblogging as a brand awareness or advertising tool. But now a growing number are using it to promote their corporate responsibility activities. Wal-Mart recently worked with Weibo to launch a charity event called @Warming Up Our Communities, where 350 Wal-Mart stores across the country delivered thousands of “warm” gift packages to needy people in local communities.

Weibo owner Sina believes that charities and corporations are only just starting to learn how to use social media effectively in China. They’re predicting a massive boom in 2013. In China, increasingly, social awareness and charity may well be spread largely online.

Paul French has been based in China for more than 20 years and is a partner in the research publisher Access Asia-Mintel.