Stripe is powering the donation drives of Singapore’s National Council of Social Services, the national coordinating body for over 550 charities and social service agencies. 

Community Chest, the philanthropy and engagement arm of Singapore’s National Council of Social Services (NCSS), supports more than 200 critical social service programs that empower adults with disabilities, children with special needs and youth-at-risk, persons with mental health conditions and families and seniors in need of support. 

As part of its 40th anniversary celebrations this year, it will produce The Community Chest 40th Anniversary TV Show — a live variety showcase fundraiser — where donations will, for the first time ever, be fully digital.

With this new function, it enables all payment to be done through QR codes for the event, designed to help ease all generations (including elderly people) into the world of digital payments. Stripe is powering the upcoming donation drives of Community Chest and President’s Challenge.

In doing so, Stripe hopes to usher in a new era of digital and cashless giving, in support of the national agenda for digitalization, as well as in response to donors’ preferences for quick and easy ways to donate.

While charities globally recognize the need of digitalization, many still struggle with legacy organization structure. And with the rise of varied scams and physical donation thefts in recent times, this shift towards digital donations represents a timely implementation to safeguard charities present and future.

Audiences will need to scan QR codes to donate using credit or debit cards and PayNow, a popular real time payment option in Singapore. Donations to Community Chest during the anniversary TV show are powered by Stripe, which offers best-in-class security tools as a certified PCI Service Provider Level 1, the most stringent level of certification in the payments industry. Additionally, all transactions on the Stripe network are 3D Secure (“3DS”) supported, providing an additional layer of security that requires 2-step authentication so that no payments go through unless they are authorized by users. 

Community Chest will also rely on Stripe Radar, which uses machine learning to proactively detect and block fraudulent actors.

“Even if there may be many challenges in doing good for society, using technology to scale and grow shouldn’t be one of them,”

Sarita Singh, Regional Head for Stripe in Southeast Asia, India, and Greater China

Besides Community Chest: Uniting Hearts 2023 Charity TV Show, Stripe is helping to power other initiatives, including at the Istana Open House by President’s Challenge and Community Chest’s Empowering Lives: Food for Good, among many other events and campaigns. 

In November 2023, Stripe will also power donations for The President’s Star Charity, which is Mediacorp’s flagship fundraiser in support of the President’s Challenge – another key initiative by NCSS.  Globally, Stripe partners with many charities and fundraising platforms including Singapore’s National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre (for its Giving.sg platform), and UK’s GiveTap.