It's not as easy as it seems

The emerging world of micro-finance is not free of controversy. There are multiple factors that make organizations and businesses in this field be exposed to increased scrutiny by engaged observers. Some of the issues debates are, for instance, the high interest rates that borrowers have to pay, or how a strong focus on micro-finance can hide the lack of efficient government poverty eradication policies, or the how the overwhelming pressure for borrowers to pay back has led many to suicide.

KIVA, the first online micro-lending platform in the world, knows exactly what I'm talking about. For this blog post, I'm going to be focusing on how it is that KIVA's staff is developing its capacity to keep up with the ever changing challenges that the Web 2.0 brings about while also exploring how they deal with the controversies present in contemporary micro-finance debates.

One of the things that I didn't get to write about in my last blog about KIVA, was its facebook page. There is much being said nowadays about the importance of using facebook as a (free) marketing tool with endless capacity to reach fans around the world (Mashable's facebook week is a great example of this...they have a bunch of great ideas, check it out!). This is what KIVA's facebook looks like:
Pretty decent looking, with 118,559 "likes" and a very engaged audience. Pretty much every post they put up (which they updated often) gets a lot of "likes" and also comments. I saw that they used their facebook page to let users know about the new website that they were releasing -You see it first! Preview the new look of Kiva.org. - a good way to keep users excited about upcoming stuff (indeed, they got 138 "likes" and 14 comments for this post!).

While most of the comments are positive, I came across a couple of negative ones...and unfortunately, did not see KIVA addressing them! Very unusual for a marketing staff that usually gets things right. For example, a very angry user posted the following:
While she did get a response from another user - which usually counts as user interaction towards a the parameters of a successful website - there was no response from KIVA's staff. Rather than addressing the user's concern, by ignoring this comment KIVA is not only losing this one user, but in addition, risks the possibility of losing way more. One of would think that if KIVA is such a successful organization in the field...they would have the right answer to this question, right? Or at least they would be able to address the user's concern.

Nevertheless, on their facebook page there were a couple of instances in which users posing difficult questions were ignored...only when users post about how to make a loan does KIVA respond...That to me, seems like they are "shouting", rather than embracing a main tenement of the groundswell which is to talk, converse with the audience. This, therefore, would be my recommendation # 1 for KIVA: read chapter 6 of the Groundswell and apply the concepts presented therein.

Another analysis that I did of KIVA's facebook page was based on the tips given by mashable (yeah, my obsession with mashable is now fully disclosed). In this article, mashable provides a breakdown of elements of a successful facebook page. Does KIVA have these elements? Well, sort of. I looked at a few of them.

First element, networking with other sites: building a large following requires a network of other platforms, working in conjunction to drive visitors to your fan page ( your organization's website). Unfortunately, KIVA's main website does not have a link to its facebook page. Second element, creating a resource: use the information as added value to have consumers create a connection with the brand. No, I don't think their facebook page has enough resources...again, they're just "shouting": every post is about the organization (and how great it is) and there is no links to useful resources. Third element, creating content that includes participation. Good, they stepped up in this element. They are encouraging users to participate to win a skype chat with Dr. Yunus. They call it "tweet and win" - not bad.


Fourth element, targeting the proper demographic. Let's not forget that understanding the demographic present can help you decide if Facebook is worth it for your business. The mashable article describes how based on data from Quantcast, a tool that allows one to estimate the demographics of a site (among other things), Facebook's users skew towards female youths...53% of users have kids...a majority make over $60k a year salary... 50% are college kids. But I was interested in looking at age:

So...if those are the demographics of Facebook, it would be interesting to look at the demographics of KIVA to see the organization's potential use of Facebook. For KIVA, the age estimations are as follows:

Aja! While most Facebook users are young, the majority of KIVA's users are middle-aged. What this means is that KIVA's Facebook site success will be based on how they are able to target facebook's majority population. Hence, my recommendation #2 for KIVA would be to ensure that marketing strategies take into account specific goals to target younger people. I believe this can be done. After all, teenagers could be interested in making loans too...right? Mashable reminds us that "the demographics that make up Facebook are changing quickly, as more moms have begun to join and the college market has become saturated — so be sure to keep checking up on demographic changes over time. As Facebook changes, your campaigns may need to change with it for maximum effect". Great advise, seriously.

One of the things I'm really curious about is how KIVA is dealing with some of its users concerns about the high interest rate of the loans disbursed by the MFIs that they work with. My attention was caught by KIVA's response following a New York Times article that called out MFI's for making a profit by charging high interest rates. Interestingly, Premal Shal posted a whole article in response providing what I found to be a really helpful Q&A section about the questions raised in the NYT article and particularly about the MFI, LAPO, featured in it. I found this an important response by KIVA, a good way of addressing the issues that can make its users mistrust the organization. It seems that KIVA understands the challenges of high interest rates, but they try to make the users understand that they are trying their best.
I also went on KIVA's new online forum, KIVA friends, to check out if there was some fuzz in there about interest rates and wasn't all that surprised to see a thread that read like this:

Topic: MFI's Extortionate Interest Rates ... up to 58% ! (Read 16296 times)

And, yeah, it was read 16,296 times! This means that KIVA is providing lenders to access a platform in which they can discuss any issues that are relevant to their experience with the organization. Even if they might be fed up with people complaining about high interest rates for borrowers, they are ready to listen to what people have to say.

They are also on board with the whole WIKI revolution. The have their own KIVApedia site, look:
This is what we have been talking about it class - and what Li and Bernoff remind us constantly. There currently exists a larger than ever opportunity ahead of organizations and business in the Web 2.0 world to use social media tools to allow for greater communication with customers. It seems that KIVA knows this which is why my recommendation # 3 would be to continue the good work they have done updating their online platforms so as to include client's input as much as possible.

On my previous blog about KIVA I wrote about KIVA's great response to concerns about transparency. I found another blog that describes the issue a bit more in depth and draws this very important lesson that describes that KIVA is in many ways, doing a good job in terms of its social marketing work. The author of the blog "Beyond Profit" states that when there is some problem "it really matters how you clean up the mess you have created. And Kiva did it with the utmost dignity. Kiva may have erred in its self-representation, but at the end of the day, they handled the criticism admirably. They have changed their communication to improve clarity for donors and have taken a proactive approach to rebuild trust with lenders". In class we discussed the importance of being open and transparent when issues come up...and it seems that KIVA handled what could have otherwise been a PR disaster really well.

What is more, I came across this really helpful powerpoint presentation by Premal Shal, KIVA's co-founder and current president:

Kiva Applying ‘Web 2.0’ To Philanthropy

View more presentations from Cazoomi Technology

Shal talks about how KIVA embraces 4 main tenants of the Web 2.0 principles:

• Create an "addictive" user experience
• Be "radically transparent"
• "Crowdsource" against constraints
  
• Build in "increasing returns on data"
  

I found this presentation to be really helpful because it allowed me to contrast KIVA's performance with the things we discuss in class because we have, indeed, gone over the above-mentioned tenants. Here's how I read Shal's presentation:

• How and why to make sure users stay engaged. Addicted.
  
• Why is openness important (PR strategies). Why trust matters. A lot.
  
• Networking, partnering, sharing resources...more important than ever.
• Measure your success...and use it to be even more successful.

Because KIVA is an organization based on a smart, creative, and unique use of the internet it comes to me as no surprise that they are doing a pretty decent job in terms of their social media presence.

So far it seems that the organization is still the most successful one at what it does. Increasingly, however, others are copying its model. For example, Vittana is taking a similar approach to helping fund education in developing countries by allowing you to lend directly to students in the developing world. As other organization's emerge, it will be crucial to see how KIVA differentiates itself from them. Of course, being the organization that revolutionized the microfinance world they have a head start. But given that things nowadays change at a very fast pace, KIVA will have to work hard to ensure that it's place as the world's largest online lending platform remains untouched.

"The groundswell is about to become embedded within every activity of our lives"

Today I realized that the first thing that I do when I wake up is turn my laptop on (of course, this routine is increasingly intensifying as I await to receive an e-mail to inform me whether I got a job or not). It is a coincidence that I had that thought today as I prepare myself to write this blog about the ending chapters of the Groundswell. These last two chapters touch on the importance of social media for our daily operations - whether we talk about our operations as humans (i.e. our interactions with other humans) or our operations as business and organizations (i.e. our interactions with our clients).

Chapter 11 describes the opportunity that lies ahead of businesses to make use of social media tools to advance their goals. The chapter focuses on the premise that a company's development is everyone's task and that listening to what employees have to say does not only keep employees satisfied, but it also can help the company be more successful. An example that was brought up in the chapter and that I believe we had discussed briefly in class already, is Best Buy's Blue Nation initiative which is an internal social network for employees of the electronics super store. The following video shows the reasoning process that Best Buy went through in order to put this initiative together and explains how it works and what are some of the positive things that came out of it.

Best Buy: The Company As Wiki from peter hirshberg on Vimeo.

The idea is to use social media tools and technologies to foster improved internal communications (without a doubt, as Li and Bernoff show us, one of the most effective activations of social media in the enterprise). There is no doubt that (especially) for large organizations, tapping into the underground conscience of the company through open feedback from employees has changed the culture of running a business. It's provides a great opportunity to keep your staff satisfied, engaged, motivated and contributing to the creative process so that the company can create a better product that is better suited for the public - and therefore that can have better profit margins. Other companies initiatives include creating wikis for their employees to share information relevant to the company's operations such as Intelpedia.

The main premise of chapter 12 is to urge us to NOT miss the high-speed train of social media! The authors remind us that the technology is out there already...all we need to do is use it. Whether it is for your own personal uses (e.g. socializing), for your organization's work (e.g. raising awareness) or for your company (e.g. selling more and selling better stuff) social media technologies are waiting for your to embrace them. Give them a handshake, a kiss on the cheek, and a huge hug. You will not regret it. The authors remind us, however, that there are some principles to follow in order to be successful in this social-media run world. They urge us not to forget that while everything can be done through computers (or phones...) this is still a person-to-person business - more than ever before. Listening, as the authors remind us, is key to success in the groundswell..."the best listeners will end up the smartest", right? Patience, opportunism, flexibility, humbleness and collaboration are all qualities that fit the winner(s) of the groundswell.

There is no doubt that the groundswell has reached every single aspect of our lives. Things are different now...and those that don't realize it will be left behind. A great example of this is the SuperMarmite idea which allows people to post the meal that they are cooking so that neighbors can come enjoy the food therefore creating a nice community, sharing resources, and doing something different. Rather than buying some cheap, nasty fast food, or microwaving a meal for yourself, using this website can guide you to someone else's kitchen or can help you meet people by inviting them to your place. Check out the video of the young French creator of SuperMarmite and learn more about this great idea...I loved it! What do you think ?

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!

Darius Goes West

I was reading about a new initiative that aims to use social media as a facilitator for social change: Youtube's 5th Annual DoGooder Non-Profit Video Awards. This initiatives, which is funded by The Case Foundation, will award $10,000 grants to the video winners in four categories - Best Small Org Video, Best Medium Org Video, Best Large Org Video, and the newcomer, the Best Thrifty Video. In addition, the winners will be featured on Youtube's page ("the nonprofit equivalent of an ad in the Super Bowl").

I watched one of the videos that won last year in the category of Small Org. and was very inspired. The video that they presented to Youtube tells the story of Darius Weems, a teenager afflicted with Duchenne muscular dystrophy who embarked on a 7,000 road trip during the summer of 2005 to promote awareness of the fatal disease (Darius lost his 18 year old brother to this disease) and to raise money for research into a cure. An award winning documentary film was born out of this trip and it is used as the main tool for spreading the word about Darius's story and his disease.
I was so inspired and curious by the video that I went ahead to find their website. Going over it, I realized that the Darius Goes West team was a great example of an organization that makes use of social media tools to advance its goals. This is precisely what this blog is about: studying how non-profit organizations benefit from the Groundswell to fulfill their purposes. The next step seems obvious: I used the knowledge gained in class to analyze, more in depth, the different ways in which the Darius Goes West organization uses social media. So fascinating.

The first thing that came to my mind when I opened the website was that it was full of gadgets. One can watch videos of very diverse things, such as Darius playing guitar and singing, or, of course, a trailer of the movie. One can also look at the recent updates posted by the organization and follow their blog posts (e.g. Darius's birthday celebration).

Or, one can "like" Darius Goes West on facebook (which an impressive 16,671 people did, including me!).Of course, there is also a link for making a donation or for buying merchandise. The power of visual communication, through pictures but most importantly through videos, is a key feature of the Groundswell. And this organization seems to have a good understanding of this: throughout the website one can find short, well-done videos.

With all these gadgets, the organization is making sure that the visitors stays engaged, a key aspect to making social media marketing successful. What is more, the organization encourages visitors to get involved and take action. For example, users are encouraged to host a screening of the movie. Or educators can receive a copy of the DVD for free to spread the message to their students. But, what I found the coolest, was that users have the opportunity to skype with Darius. That can be the ultimate experience for users. What's even coolest about this, is that Darius will skype with those who are able to have have a computer (duh!), make a skype account (duh!), but most importantly each skype group has to raise $100 to get to skype with Darius. Isn't that a great way to motivate users to be engaged? I thought it was brilliant. When clicking on the "skype with Darius" link, this very well-done video pops-up:

After visiting the website and learning about the organization and Darius's life and can help to feel hopeful for the infinity of options that the new social media phenomenon opens to the non-profit world. Kudos to the Darius Goes West team for embracing the Groundswell.