WeChat just released the first oversea Official Account with WeChat payment. And it’s a great one: UNICEF.
Support children victim of the Nepal earthquake via WeChat
The account was created in reaction to the Nepal earthquake, in order to provide emergency aid.
In addition to enabling financial gift for Nepal, it enables donators to focus on giving specific life-enhancing supplies to support long-term children development in target countries. Examples of potential donations include:
- Vaccinations
- Micronutrients
- Education support
Smart and lean
This move from WeChat is an interesting and very lean move in order to kick-off their payment platform outside China.
Instead of labelling the platform as yet another e-commerce channel, they choose to brand it under a “doing good” label. Most importantly, Nepal earthquake gave people the feeling of urgency to act: a great reason to link your bank card to your WeChat account under no delay.
The focus is also put in one of the few countries where WeChat stands a chance in terms of short-term international expansion (Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan) as we discussed in a previous article.
Made in China, only for users outside China
The account is of course not accessible from within China (Tencent applied the very smart strategy of keeping users within China to see content written outside China so as to avoid having to censor oversea content).
But if you happen to be outside China, you can follow the account via the following ID: unicef_hk
Or the following QR code:
