tl;dr: Not bad

It’s been roughly 5 months since the Unicode Consortium launched its Adopt a Character program to raise funds for continued Unicode development. We wanted to check in again and tally up how much money has been raised.

If this is your first time hearing about Adopt a Character, read our post here. In short, Adopt a Character, launched in December 2015, allows people to “adopt” (sponsor) emojis or other characters for a donation. There are three levels of sponsorship, Bronze, Silver, and Gold, which require a pledge of $100, $1k, and $5k respectively.

So how’s the Unicode Consortium doing?

From our latest tally of donations it looks like the Unicode Consortium has raised 88k since the Adopt a Character campaign began in December.  Here’s the breakdown:

• 12 Gold Sponsors X $5,000 each = $60,000 (+$20,000 from March 1st)
• 4 Silver Sponsor X $1,000 each = $4,000 (+$3,000 from March 1st)
• 243 Bronze Sponsors X $100 each = $24,300 (+$13,600 from March 1st)
• Total: $88,300 (+$36,600 from March 1st)

We last tallied up donations in early March (here). So in the last roughly 2.5 months, the Unicode Consortium has more than doubled its Bronze donations, and received 3 new Silver & 4 new Gold sponsors. Interestingly, there seem to be some repeat donors. Adobe made 1 gold and 2 silver donations and a company called Elastic, which appears to be focused on data insight software, made 2 gold donations.

When Adopt a Character first launched it received a fair amount of buzz. Despite the lack of press coverage now, Adopt a Character is still receiving donations. We’d say that’s “not bad”. Go Unicode!