Social Media Monitoring Assigment: Kiva - Loans that change lives

For my Social Media Monitoring Assignment I decided to look at an organization that has fundamentally revolutionized the micro-finance sector by being the first non-profit organization to enable individuals to make personal loans to micro-enterprises in developing countries via the internet: KIVA .I was interested in exploring KIVA because of the increasingly important (albeit controversial) role that micro-financing is playing in developing countries. Because I'm dedicating this blog to understanding how new social media can be a catalyst for social change, I figured that looking at KIVA would be a great opportunity for me to explore this.

But let's start with the beginning first, and then we will move on to more complicated issues.

First question: How does KIVA work?

Following the premise that small business entrepreneurs' access to credit can help eradicate poverty, Kiva.org makes use of the powerful tool of the internet to allow users to take a personal,very engaged step to help someone else across the globe. Through their website, one can review specific projects and entrepreneurs that one wants to support, and agree to give money that will go to the micro-entrepreneur of one's choice. The money (starting with $25 loans) lent will not earn any dividend for the lender, but will be used by a micro finance institution (MFI) to make a loan to the micro-entrepreneur (with interest rates serving to cover capital costs for the MFI in the country where the micro-entrepreneur resides).

Since its launch in 2005, KIVA has enabled lenders to fund over 564,410 micro-entrepreneurs in approximately 58 countries making this a total of $199M in loans to be distributed through 126 KIVA field partner MFIs with a 98.60% Repayment rate and the help of 450 volunteers around the world. On their website, KIVA explains users how the process of lending across the globe works:The above cited numbers seem to suggest that KIVA is doing really good and that the San Francisco-based organization's impact is growing throughout the world. Now, the assignment for the Social Media Marketing Class was to look at how this organization's social media buzz is: what are people saying about KIVA? How is the organization responding to customers' opinions? How engaged are customers? In order to answer these questions I made use of several tools that allowed me to track KIVA's online presence: IceRocket, Social Mention, Twitter, Youtube, Google Blog Search, Twitaholic, Trendistic, Flickr, FameCount, TweetEffect, Tweetstats are some of them.

The first day (February 19th, 2011.) that I started researching KIVA's online presence I came across very interesting things. My first curiosity, was to see what pictures came up if I searched for KIVA or KIVA loans on Flickr, one of the coolest online photo management and sharing applications out there. I was (positively) surprised to not only find regular pictures of micro-finance borrowers like the one on your left (which I expected, wouldn't you, too?), but to actually find users sharing their own personal experience with KIVA through pictures

In particular, I appreciated the input
from two users: MikeScalora who put up the following map of the loans he has made through KIVA. Another user, FinalCut also shared information about the loans he made. Rather than showing us a map, however, FinalCut made these nice graphs to break down the characteristics of his loans into gender, country, sector and partner.



Going over what's out there about KIVA on Flickr seems to indicate that KIVA's users are active and engage on the picture-sharing online community. The next question, however, would be...what are people saying about KIVA? To answer to this question, I opened a new tab and typed in what might be one of the most commonly used words now a days: Twitter.

Obviously, the first task to answer this question would be to look at the activity of KIVA's user account: @KIVA. Almost half a million followers...not bad.

KIVA, however, isn't the most followed Twitter account in the non-profit world. There are more than a couple non-profits that have surpassed the million followers on Twitter, such as the World Economic Forum or Charity Water. According to a ranking posted by Famecount, a website that compiles information on social media's "stars", KIVA ranks tenth in the Top Social Networks Stars of the Nonprofit World Ranking. I guess that really isn't bad, at all.

But instead of just looking at this basic info (i.e. number of users), I went ahead to use some of the above-mentioned tools to really get a grasp of what KIVA's presence on Twitter is. I explored Famecount a little further to find out that while KIVA presents an upward trend in the total number of new followers (graph#1), compared to the average at which other Twitter accounts get new users, KIVA is growing rather slowly in comparison (graph # 2).

Graph # 1 Graph # 2
This is a quantitative analysis tool that indicates that KIVA is doing a good job, but that there certainly is room for improvement. Another tool that I used that helped me come up with this hypothesis (i.e. there is room for improvement) was TweetEffect, a website that shows the numbers of new followers...but also the number of followers who decide to stop following.

KIVA, in this regard, is not doing all that great. According to the data collected by Tweeteffect, KIVA is losing more followers than it is gaining new ones. Bummer. Check it out:


While this quantitative analysis is important and useful (particularly for KIVA's social media marketing staff...) I was also curious about what people were saying about KIVA on Twitter. My search on February 19th showed some interesting results. Especially, people being excited about their loans through KIVA. Here are a couple of examples of what people were saying about their experience:

What I found even more fascinating was that some people were encouraging ohter Twitter users to follow them (on Twitter) and if they reached a certain number of followers....they would make a loan through KIVA themselves! I thought that was an original idea: encourage people to follow you by telling them that you will do something positive if they do so (and at the same time, helping yourself stay engaged and motivated for your social media/social good endeavors!).

@EPicolotto, for example, did this.
I was also curious to see whether KIVA experiences more traffic on its Twitter site on special days. The 8th of March provided a good opportunity for me to test this. (I got the idea to this when on that day I received an e-mail (newsletter) from KIVA).

Using TweetStats, I was able to see that, indeed, on International Women's Days, KIVA had more activity on its site


Another tool I used to get a better understanding of KIVA's presence on the web is Social Mention, a website that searches "for content from across the universe" to provide information about the consistency with which a name/brand/organization is mentioned on the web.

The site takes into account strength (defined as the likelihood that the brand is discussed in social media), passion (is the likelihood that the users that discuss your brand do so repeatedly), reach (being a measure of the range of influence), and sentiment (the rate of mentions that are generally positive to those that are generally negative).

This information is updated continuously and therefore provides a good idea of how KIVA, in this case, is doing.

Other graphs help us illustrate the case better, such as this the showing the sentiment (while on the left we see that KIVA's ratio is 12:1 positive:neutral, the graph tells us that much of what is being said is actually neutral).


I figured that getting a real understanding of KIVA's presence on the web also entailed looking a little more in depth into what people are saying about it. While Twitter is not bad at all as measure of their online activity, there is definitively another tool to understand what people think about KIVA: blogs.

Using two blog search tools, Google Blog Search and IceRocket (which is also useful for finding news, images, videos etc.) I came across a couple of interesting blogs. While there were many that had insightful comments about KIVA and the microfinance world in general, I mostly enjoyed reading the Technbiz's blog, which is why I would like to share it with you.

In his blog, Paramendra Bhagat (who, by the way, is followed by over 2,000 people and over 40,000 followers on Twitter, and has been writing extensively since 2005) goes into contemporary debates on microfinance. His blog post "Microfinance: no substitute for good governance" touches on important aspects of microfinance. What's more, he endorses KIVA's work by stating the following:

Microfinance is not the only tool with which to cure poverty. And it might or might not be the best tool. But poverty is a big enough and complex enough problem that we have to throw all tools at our disposal. Microfinance is one of those tools. It just so happens to be the tool of choice for me. I believe that you can deliver revolutionary poverty alleviation through for profit, high tech microfinance.

In another blogpost (he writes quite a lot about KIVA and microfinance) he states:

"I am a huge fan of Kiva They went from raising $5 million five years ago to raising over $100 million last year and are projected to raise close to a billion dollars in five years. But that would still be a drop in the ocean. Global poverty is no small challenge".

His real passion for microfinance, however, comes out in a blog post where he questions why it is that KIVA doesn't operate in India (I think he's originally from there). He posts the question that Matt Flannery, one of KIVA's founders, responded to on Quora, an online space for people to post and answer questions:

Baghat isn't really satisfied with the answer, however. He posts that he "just sent an email to my top microfinance contacts in India asking her to look into the "license to transact debt capital cross border" thing that Matt Flannery, one of the founders of Kiva has raised in a Quora thread". He's definitely invested...I don't know what happened to that but I'm sort of curious. I'll definitely will let you know if I read anything else.

The organization also has blogs of its own -a rather complete array of blogs: blogs with updates from the organization, from fellows working in the field, from partners around the world, loan updates, and one can even see loan updates from borrowers in one's own portfolio (i.e. updates from the loans one has made). I think KIVA provides an interesting set of updates in their blogs - you can find them here if you want to learn more about them: To end this blog entry I wanted to share about how KIVA's marketing staff really embraces one of the main tenets of the Groundswell: they listen. Apparently, a some time ago there was some controversy because KIVA was simplifying the way loans are actually distributed. In 2009, David Roodman an expert in microfinance posted a blog titled "Kiva Is Not Quite What It Seems" that raised a lot of controversy. One of the main aspects that was brought to light was the hidden complexity of the way loans are disbursed: Roodman called KIVA out for simplifying the process through the following diagram:

The author says that, in reality, less that 5% of Kiva loans are disbursed after they are listed and funded on Kiva’s site and that users are misled into thinking that as soon as they make their payment the money is going to the borrowers.

With 92 comments spurring an intense debate on this blog post, plus more controversy in other social media sites (including a couple hundred tweets, several other blog posts elsewhere, 10,000 hits to the original post), Roodman got a response that he perhaps wasn't expecting. He got a personal reply from Matt Flannery, but most importantly he got KIVA to revise their website.

First of all, KIVA updated the old diagram (the very simple one) to the more complicated one I posted at the beginning of this post and also added an entire section of its website dedicated to helping users understand how exactly KIVA works, including this video:

How Kiva Works from Kiva Microfunds on Vimeo.

In addition to that, KIVA also upgraded its website which got a lot of kudos from online users. The new website's main portal looks like this:Perhaps more importantly, KIVA's website now has an online portal called KIVA Friends: a community for lenders - by lenders. Guests can sign in for free for full access to all community features and functions (with forums related to KIVA's work), including instant messaging and message viewing preferences.

What we see is that instead of creating a whole marketing fiasco, KIVA listened to what people were saying (writing) about the organization. And with this new website it really seems that they are excited about continuing to listen. There is no doubt that KIVA is on the right track. To wrap up this blog post, I leave you with a PBS video that follows a KIVA loan recipient in Uganda. Enjoy!