Tencent Foundation's Mountain Lights turns donating into a game that lights school roads

Children in Suichuan County, Jiangxi, wake before dawn and walk up to six kilometers to school along mountain roads with no streetlights; the county alone had 20,789 such students. Tencent Foundation had tried to raise money for lamps, but in almost two years it collected less than 2,000 yuan. Through the 2018 'I Am a Charity Creator' contest run with Tencent Advertising, Hylink Guangzhou built WeChat's first charity mini-game, named Mountain Lights (灯山行动), to make the children's nightly journey the experience itself.

Players steer a virtual child through hazards — cliffs, falling rocks, wild animals and a flashlight that fades — drawn from the team's own night-time filming of the real route. Donating one yuan buys a streetlight item that brightens the path in-game, with no extra jumps or forms, and leaderboards and share challenges pushed the game through WeChat group chat. It ran as an ad inside WeChat Moments and Official Accounts and even launched from QQ Browser, becoming the platform's first charity mini-game advertisement.

In its first two days more than 20,000 people donated about 300,000 yuan, and by the end of the first week the game had drawn over 840,000 visits and 12,500 shares. WeChat advertising reached more than 36 million people, registered players passed 1.1 million within about 60 days, and total donations topped 1.8 million yuan — over 300 percent of the original 600,000-yuan goal — enough to light roads around 30 villages instead of the planned ten.