Abstract: The relevance and scientific significance of the research topic are determined by the importance of charity as a type of social practice aimed at preventing negative consequences of social risks for a person and solving social problems. The article presents the characteristics of the Yenisei Gubernskie Vedomosti newspaper in the context of donations and charitable events during the First World War. The full set of the publication for the period from August 1, 1914 (the beginning of military actions) to [21] March 1917 (the end of the publication of the newspaper under the specified name) was analyzed. The main research questions were focused on identifying the forms of charitable donations and ways of attracting them, determining the initiators/actors of charitable events and recipients of assistance, establishing the dynamics of indicators (the volume of donations, the number of charitable events, etc.) and their spatial differentiation. The work applies the main concepts and approaches of historical informatics, the analytical part is based on the statistical processing of historical data, which increases the efficiency of using the information potential of the source. The scientific novelty of the work lies in solving the problem of organizing the source information, characterized by unevenness of the deposited data, weak formalization, different completeness of characteristics of a particular object according to the parameters studied. A number of quantitative (number of charity events, volume of their resources) and qualitative (means and forms of assistance, structure of donations, mechanisms for raising funds) are given. Based on the frequency of occurrence of semantic categories in the array of the Yenisei Gubernskie Vedomosti newspaper, the authors state the asynchronous and nonlinear development of social campaigns to raise funds aimed at supporting the front and needy strata of the population during the period under study (August 1914 - March 1917).