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The phenomenal Ice Bucket Challenge was once a great example for the promotion of philanthropy communication campaign. However, a new way – ‘fan economy’（粉丝经济）, has been rising these years. That is to say, fans would initiate or support a philanthropy campaign in the name of a celebrity. They do so in order to create or maintain a positive image of their idols and increase their media exposure. Such type of support group could also be called ‘Oendan’（应援团）. In 2014, several donation events were organized in this manner and caught some attention. Since then, fan philanthropy has been rising in the eyes of some major foundations and NGOs, who quickly start to explore different formats of fan philanthropy. Yet, fan philanthropy is still at early stage and examples are rare.

Venture Avenue (VA) is a pioneer in this area. Our practice has proved that collaborating with fans clubs is of great benefit for companies. Compared to traditional CSR promotion, this new form of partnership generates not only deeper engagements with employees and clients, but also broader branding effects for the company.

Case Sharing: The First Sound
First Sound is co-founded by VA and China Women’s Development Foundation (CWDF). The purpose is to help children with severe hearing impairment by getting a cochlea implant. On March 3rd, the International Ear-Care Day, First Sound launched a fund-raising campaign in collaboration with several companies including UCAR Inc.（神州专车） and VIPSHOP（唯品会）. The campaign is basically a storytelling game, where celebrities start with the beginning, and the public is invited to continue the story by filling the details, on social media.

Roles:
As the project management team, VA and CWDF send invitation to celebrities through their network, and also take responsibility for designing, planning and organizing the campaign.
As major sponsors, companies (UCAR, VIPSHOP, etc.) donate to First Sound. They also bring in their resources from the entertainment industry.
Platforms set rules of the game. They contribute their extensive user bases to the campaign while the campaign pushes new users to these platforms. They also help bring in celebrities.
Celebrities attract people to participate in the game, where they write the first sentence and invite the public to continue. One user writes a second sentence and another, the third. The three sentences together are expected to form a short story.
To encourage more participation, the number of tasks (stories written) completed by users is shown in the form of a progress bar（进度条）on a platform (Ricedonate). The project management team will select stories of high quality as teaching materials for children in their recovery training process.

The collaboration of the five roles defined above was proved successful. On March 3rd, the event brought the donating companies exposure of over 160,000,000 times on Weibo and Ricedonate. More than 530, 000 children were able to benefit from the donation gathered during this event.

Key Success Factors
Understanding the needs of fans club for deeper engagement
The event should be fun and simple for participation, and game demonstration is often necessary. For example, successful events like Ice Bucket Challenge, Rice Only（白饭行动）, Sleep Challenge（睡眠挑战）, storytelling game（故事接龙）are all simple, fun and with examples demonstrated by celebrities. Creating and successfully promoting an event like this is no easy task. VA’s experience has shown that breakthrough happens only when management, companies and media platform go beyond their respective responsibilities. In fact, they must break the boundaries, understand and adjust to the needs of each party in their collaborative brainstorming, in searching for optimal practicality, so as to get a fruitful result.
Positive feedback and substantial encouragement shall be timely provided to fans clubs. Sometimes, it is not necessarily the financial rewards. More often, this should be tailored based on the specific needs of different fans clubs. For example, recognition directly from celebrities is a great way to stimulate more participation.
Integration of entertainment industry resources: Support from celebrities is, by definition, crucial for the promotion of fan charity events. This requires collaborative efforts from NGOs or executive party of the event, corporate sponsors and media platforms to secure celebrities. The participation of one celebrity would lead to a second one, a third one, and so on. Though securing the first celebrity could often be difficult, once the first is confirmed, the rest will naturally follow.
Platform management: Many companies have already established long-term philanthropy projects in their CSR work plans, but they may lack CSR marketing partner or relevant experiences in CSR marketing management. VA’s experience shows that the quality of CSR marketing platform is essential to the success of fan charity events. Here are some factors to bear in mind when choosing a partner:
Is the platform able to respond and customize per corporation’s CSR needs? (e.g., is it possible to determine the identity of employees on the platform? What are the rules to form teams? How to calculate and compare scores? How to distribute online reward?)
Is the platform popular? Does the platform have a large number of users?
Does the platform have, in general, good feedbacks from users?
Could the platform provide a capable team to develop ideas?
Could the platform cater to corporations’ need, especially in a proactive and quick manner?

It is believed that there are increasing CSR managers who takes brand exposure rate as a factor in choosing philanthropy project. Keeping low profile is not a virtue for philanthropy projects. High exposure is a plus for well-designed projects, because it contributes to both attracting donations and making public impact, and subsequently, to help more people and educate the public on specific philanthropy topics.