On the evening of September 5th, Ma Huateng, Executive Director, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Tencent, issued a company-wide letter stating that this year's connection of goodness will be upgraded. In the future, Tencent's charity platform will transform from a donation-focused platform to a goodness ecosystem connector that coordinates social forces from all sectors, connecting various social forces through more innovative digital technologies and charity products to become a vibrant, collaborative, complementary, and thriving goodness ecosystem.

The following is the full text of the company-wide letter:

I Have a Little Red Flower: Warming Others, Reflecting on Ourselves

Dear Colleagues,

Today is China Charity Day and also the launch day of the "Long-lasting Public Welfare Festival." The Chinese nation has long held charitable virtues of mutual assistance, helping those in distress, and being generous with charity. Our evolution from "99 Public Welfare Day" to "Long-lasting Public Welfare Festival" represents both the promotion and innovation of this tradition.

This year's Long-lasting Public Welfare Festival theme is "I Have a Little Red Flower," hoping that everyone can reflect on themselves while helping others. Since the first "99 Public Welfare Day" in 2015, little red flowers have illuminated the charitable actions of over 30,000 Tencent employees, collectively driving change through 1,754 charitable practice projects.

Among them, over 20,000 emergency rescue volunteers have used their professional emergency rescue skills to complete more than ten "life-saving rescues" on streets, subways, and parks over the past three years. Employee volunteers have also initiated "Community Friendly Programs," mobilizing over 500 colleagues and their families to bring Tencent's charity projects and volunteer services in anti-fraud, minor protection, youth science education, and assistance for the disadvantaged to communities. Wherever goodness reaches, more and more little red flowers are blooming vibrantly.

Meanwhile, we use various products to connect and gather goodness, ensuring every act of love can be implemented and every small act of kindness becomes more powerful. On Tencent's charity platform, every charity participant is our user.

We believe that "doing good" is human instinct and a genuine need in every user's heart. Therefore, we need to find charity scenarios within products like WeChat, refining more accessible, tangible, and diverse charity products to provide charity services and meet everyone's charity needs. In this way, every penny donated becomes a seed of goodness, taking root in the fertile soil of trust. This is our starting point for exploring digital charity and our effort to practice the vision of "everyone doing good."

For this year's Long-lasting Public Welfare Festival, besides traditional donations, we have launched various charity products integrated into daily life scenarios. Such as the "Nearby Charity Map," allowing everyone to conveniently view nearby charity opportunities; "Little Red Flower QR Code," enabling anyone to do charity by scanning codes. We have also launched new functions like "Team Donations" for friends to participate together, mobile scanning to donate idle books, opening WeChat to receive "Electronic Blood Donation Certificates," and new charity experiences such as participating in cultural relic protection at museums, participating in neighborhood mutual assistance in communities, and bringing female relatives to participate in free "Two-Cancer Screenings."

We hope to continuously lower the barriers to charity participation, helping everyone discover charity projects that are "around me, in my hometown, that I like" anytime, anywhere, making the occurrence, reach, and realization of goodness within easy reach.

From "connecting widespread social donations" to "connecting diverse charity services," the Long-lasting Public Welfare Festival has entered a new stage. Starting this year, the Long-lasting festival cancels matching donations, but Tencent's investment and long-term support for charity remains unchanged. More funds and resources are being invested in the digital construction of charity organizations, and charity funds are distributed to let new users experience digital charity.

In this process, we will continue to collaborate with major charity organization partners and caring merchants, continuously coordinating over 100 business units and products within Tencent to provide better charity services for everyone and better digital intelligence support for the charity industry.

Currently, Tencent's charity platform has more and more projects accessing digital fund disbursement tools, material distribution tools, and service execution tools. We have also introduced ecosystem partners like SF Express and EMS, ensuring every penny donated, every package, and every course has efficiency and transparency supported by digitalization, thereby helping charity organizations gain greater trust and support while bringing faster and more effective assistance to beneficiaries.

These are all our new explorations in the charity field. We look forward to everyone bringing friends and family to experience more, share more, and provide more feedback on Tencent's charity platform to help products continuously iterate and optimize.

Over the past decade, 24,000 charity organizations and 67,000 charity projects have participated in annual 99 events, with drops of goodness converging into 18.3 billion yuan in charitable funds, collectively driving change in education assistance, child care, poverty alleviation, rural development, environmental protection, and other fields.

Now, based on more innovative digital technologies and charity products, from charity users, charity organizations, large enterprises to small and medium merchants to all aspects of social forces, they are being widely connected, becoming a vibrant, collaborative, complementary, and thriving goodness ecosystem.

In this way, Tencent's charity platform will gradually evolve from a donation-focused platform to a product platform that achieves the common development of donations and diverse charity, upgrading to become a goodness ecosystem connector that coordinates all sectors of society.

We look forward to such efforts bringing public welfare into everyone's daily life one step closer, and bringing the future of "everyone doing good, flowers everywhere" one step closer.