Yesterday, Facebook gave folks the first glimpse of its newly-developed suite of charitable livestreaming tools.
Twenty-five Facebook Gaming creator partners, including DangerousThing, DiMez, TheMissesMae, and X-Bit Gaming, livestreamed for #GivingTuesday — a day founded to counteract the consumerism of Black Friday and Cyber Monday — using the new tools. They raised money for organizations like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, The Humane Society of the United States, and Call of Duty Endowment (which is supported by video game publishing company Activision Blizzard and distributes funds to numerous charities supporting unemployed veterans).
With the tools, creators can run fundraisers, set and change donation goals, show their viewers a donation progress bar, and overlay donation alerts in their livestreams and chats.
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The features are currently only available to a select group of U.S.-based gamers, and also only available to charities based in the U.S. A Facebook representative tells Tubefilter that the ability to donate, however, is not restricted to U.S. viewers.
Facebook is working to expand the new charitable tools to more creator partners and charities.
Charitable giving tools are available today, #GivingTuesday, for gaming creator streams. We’re rolling out with a batch of U.S. creators first and will make the tools available more widely soon. Check out participating streamers and causes at https://t.co/ligyuXrRDH
— Facebook Gaming (@FacebookGaming) November 27, 2018
Charitable giving has been a longtime core component for many gaming streamers on other platforms like YouTube and Twitch. In August, YouTube announced it was beta testing a similar suite of creator tools, collectively called ‘YouTube Giving.’
