(CNSPHOTO)

An online campaign to provide free lunches to impoverished students was selected the Most Influential Charity Program at the Seventh China Charity Award. Deng Fei, a reporter from Phoenix Weekly magazine, is one of the founders of the program.

Deng, 34, graduated from Hunan University with a major in journalism in 2000. Since then Deng has written over 100 investigative reports, uncovering the dark side of society and winning countless awards as a reporter. He is also actively engaged in social welfare work.

The free lunch program had managed to provide free lunches for about 15,000 children across China from April to December in 2011. Launched on the Internet, the program was joined by more than 500 reporters in China and had received about 18 million yuan ($2.86 million) in donations by the end of 2011. It is now operated under the China Social Welfare Foundation.

The program has used an unusual fundraising method, running an online shop on China's most popular online shopping site Taobao. People can easily donate by buying a virtual charity product for 3 yuan ($0.48) or actual T-shirts or pins produced by the program. With these funds, the program distributed money to 129 schools to provide free lunches to needy students. In a bid to improve transparency, each school sponsored by the program is asked to set up a micro-blog to publicize the funds it receives and how the money is spent, while a volunteer is assigned to monitor the micro-blog records of a school.