A New Charity Tool: Making charity streams easier and more charitable

More charities means more charity, right? So, we added tens of thousands more PayPal-vetted charities from the US and dozens of different countries into the charity tool. Plus, fundraisers are now supported in USD, AUD, CAD, GBP, and EUR — defaulting to where the chosen charity is based.

Head to your dashboard, check out all these worthy causes, and spin up a charity stream today!

UPDATE: As of August 24, 2022, the charity tool is now out of beta and available to all Partners and Affiliates.

Charity streams are a core part of what makes Twitch a wonderful place. The generosity, the community, the sense of belonging and solidarity — it’s a beautiful experience and entirely a product of the communities and streamers who make Twitch go ‘round. We wanted to make these moments do even more good so, say hello to the new Charity Tool Beta.

What is this?

The charity tool is our new built-in fundraising stream feature that allows you to set up and run a stream for charity in just a few clicks. The hassles of running a charity stream — tracking donations, converting subs and Bits, managing multiple programs and apps at once — are what we’re hoping to make as minimally hassle-y as possible. And fewer hassles free you up to focus more on what you do best.

What’s the charity tool do?

Selecting a cause you care about and setting up a fundraising stream can all be done through the new Charity section in your Creator Dashboard.

Find a charity, set a fundraising goal, and enable a charity campaign to go into “charity mode”. This unlocks a “Donate to Charity” button for viewers to show their support.

All donations are tracked in your activity feed towards the goal you set for yourself.

Why is this better?

“Simplifying a lot of logistical hassles” is a pretty decent TL;DR answer, but blogs don’t have character limits so here are more things we think are helpful about this new tool.

All community donations go to our partner, PayPal Giving Fund, and are granted to your recommended charity in accordance with its policies. Twitch does not take a cut of these donations or receive any tax incentives. PayPal Giving Fund also handles the behind-the-scenes hassles familiar to anybody who’s ever run a fundraising stream. Accurately tracking donations and granting funds to your chosen cause is now seamless and straightforward.

For streamers, it makes raising money for important causes easier and transparent. For viewers, it should make supporting those causes simpler, clearer, and more impactful.

The beta is live now for some streamers. We’re starting small with a limited amount of charities, but we’ll add many more soon. If you’re one of the selected beta participants, you’ve already received an email about it with details. So, spin up a charity stream or check one out to see how this new tool works.

We’re counting on your support to ensure this feature does exactly what everybody wants it to and look forward to rolling it out to the rest of the community soon. So if you’ve got Q’s, we’ve got A’s in our helpful help article. Or, if you have feedback on how we can make this tool better, hop over to UserVoice and use that voice.