China Nonprofit Technology Blog

A national NGO has developed a website that offers anonymous online counselling about sexual health and HIV/AIDS. Named Hand in Hand Online (link in Chinese) after the long-running Chinese magazine for people living with HIV and AIDS, Hand in Hand, it offers a range of free interactive services to make information on sexual health more accessible to the general public via the internet.

Users can post their questions online, and receive an immediate response from volunteer counsellors and doctors who work for one of the participating counselling organizations (currently, Mangrove Support Group and Zhuoniao Online). Alternatively, users can try one of the interactive assessment tools, which guide the user through a series of questions and automatically generate advice. Interactive assessment is available for three topics: genital self-check, high-risk behaviour, and symptom assessment.

The website also offers a range of special features for HIV positive users, to help them better manage their health. This part of the site was designed by Mangrove Support Group, one of China's best-known self-help groups for people living with HIV and AIDS. After registering a free account, users can record and view information such as their medical history, changes in their CD4 cell counts and viral load readings over time, their current drug regimen, and so on. The system can even send a reminder when it is time to pick up a new supply of medicine from their health provider. And when using the online counselling service, this detailed data can also be viewed by the counsellor so that they can provide better advice or diagnosis.

Hand in Hand Online is currently in public beta, and is operated by the Chinese Association of STD and AIDS Prevention and Control (link in Chinese).

Wokai, a web-based microfinance organization in China, has recently launched an "advocate program" through which it will reward other websites for referring donors to them. But unlike most commercial affiliate programs, which pay money for referrals, Wokai will start by offering branded gifts and other non-cash prizes.

Wokai runs a peer-to-peer lending website, connecting socially-conscious investors all over the world to people in poverty-striken rural China who want to start their own small businesses. Since it was founded in 2007, Wokai has helped hundreds of rural entrepreneurs, and has been widely recognized in the Chinese and international media.

But when Wokai announced the new "advocate program" on their blog last week, it was under the self-effacing title Has Wokai gone too far? It is easy to understand their dilemma. Is this kind of promotional model compatible with the charitable principles on which their work is based? Will offering incentives bring more people to their website, or will it only destroy the good will that is the basis for word-of-mouth promotion?

Perhaps the only way to answer these questions is to give it a try. It is a brave move for Wokai, but if experiments such as these prove successful, then affiliate marketing could soon become just another "best practice" for nonprofit campaigns. In a sense, it is simply a different form of paid advertising, which many nonprofits already engage in both online and offline.

If you have any comments, we encourage you to join the discussion on Wokai's blog.

Three China-based NGOs have teamed up to organize a moderated online discussion on the topic of migrant children. Following an open 'message board' format, and with an expert available to guide the discussion, the organizers promise a unique opportunity to "Get all your questions answered and voice your opinion" during the two-week online event which starts Monday, January 3 and runs until Sunday, January 16.

The event leverages an existing online social network — the Social Innovation Meetup group — and utilizes the existing functionality of the group website. The discussion is moderated by Compassion for Migrant Children and Migrant Children Foundation, and hosted by the Foundation for Youth Social Entrepreneurship (FYSE).

For further details, read the announcement on the FYSE blog.

The latest organization to join China's nascent nonprofit technology community is one with a long and colourful history. NetEasy (link in Chinese) is an association of computer security professionals and enthusiasts, which grew out of one of China's largest hacker groups — the China Eagle Union, established in 2001. At the helm of both these organizations is Mr. Wan Tao, a minor media celebrity once dubbed the godfather of Chinese hacker culture, and an outspoken supporter of the "hacker ethic": that technology should be free, open, and make life better.

As well as maintaining a forum and website for learning and sharing information about computer security and "security culture", one of NetEasy's other goals as an organization is to perform charitable work. Their first foray into this field was a campaign, started last year, to mobilize donations for a rural school in Hunan Province. More recently, they have turned their high-tech expertise towards a broader issue: supporting other NGOs to use computer and internet technologies effectively.

Addressing an audience of NGO professionals at Storygarden Cafe in Beijing last Thursday, Mr. Wan described the new role of NetEasy, and shared the results of a recent survey in which NetEasy used publicly available data to analyze the online presence of 50 randomly selected Chinese nonprofits. Among their findings:

• 80% of organizations surveyed maintained an official website;
• Of those, more than two fifths ran an online forum or community on their website;
• Older, established NGOs tended to have more extensive websites, but younger organizations were more likely to use social media such as microblogs or Douban.

NetEasy has kindly made the slides from last week's presentation available for download here (in Chinese).