Beyond Good Intentions
Global Social Benefit Incubator
Global Social Benefit Incubator 2008
Exercise 1: Target Market Statement
GSBI 2008
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Liquidity and Community
Kiva has a pretty important software release in a couple of days.
First, we are releasing a "community" section of the site. The purpose of the section is clear enough -- to foster a sense of community among the 300K plus Kiva lenders. The way we are going about this is somewhat incremental. We are starting Thursday by launching Lending Teams on the site. This is way overdue. Lending Teams provide a way for lenders to group themselves together around certain affinities or themes of their choosing. Lenders can then choose to "count" their loans to one of their teams and the teams performance is statistically tracked and compared with other teams.
We've been getting requests to help serve groups like schools, churches, book clubs, etc for over two years. It just took this long to get the feature up there because of our org's historical focus on getting partners signed up and reducing risk on the platform. User facing features were de-prioritized in 2007 and half of 2008 because of chronic inventory shortages. Supply and demand have stabilized in recent months. This spring, we started really prioritizing our lenders again and that will bear fruit in many ways between now and the end of the year.
We originally called the feature "Lending Groups" internally. That became problematic when we introduced "Borrowing Groups" (aka Groups) on the site at the end of last year. Instead of having two things called "Groups" on the site, we chose to cluster our lenders into so-called "Teams". This then led to a series of metaphor overextensions. We have Teams. You can "recruit" for your team, you can "quit" the team and you can be a "captain" of a team. You can even "bestow captainhood" to other members of the team you are on. That sounds a little medieval if you ask me. You can tell we had a little too much fun designing and coding....
Over the last few years, major websites, no matter what space, introduced some sort of social networking element to their service. Sometimes, social features are tacked on to businesses as an awkward appendage. Pretty late to the game is Kiva with the lending teams feature entering the fray as well. I'm hoping we do it right, and do it in our own unique way. My take on socializing on Kiva is that the socializing should come within the context of making loans. I don't desire for Kiva to become a dating site or a Facebook ripoff. However, I hope that we can leverage the basic human need to socialize for the higher cause of serving the working poor in this world. We will see if we can pull off that delicate balance and walk that fine line with grace.
Of course, the biggest risk is that we spent all this time and nobody will use it. Inactivity is the biggest enemy of any web-based business. Afterall, the vast majority of websites have little usage. Non-profit websites are particularly at risk. Activity is a rare gem. I'll be tracking that pretty closely on this blog in the weeks to come.
Maybe more exciting than our foray into social networking is a second feature we will release on Thursday -- increased liquidity. For the first time, our loans will begin repaying you -- the user -- throughout the loan term. Up until this point in time, users needed to wait until the end of a loan to receive Kiva Credit which they can withdraw, relend, gift or donate. Meanwhile, Kiva was receiving monthly wire transfers from our Field Partner MFIs and holding the cash in our bank account. The origin of this decision dates back to 2004 when we did not have the sophistication to settle payments more frequently. We've been working for most of the year to correct this decision. The result is that now, when Kiva actually receives the cash in our bank account we will allow our users to access these funds. I read somewhere once that increased liquidity is always good for a market. We will see if this axiom reigns true for the infantile marketplace of Kiva in the coming months. On Thursday, we will make about $10M in Kiva Credit liquid!
Piece by piece, we are assembling an awesome engineering team at Kiva. I didn't make these features happen, it was the team. In no particular order, Zvi, Jeremy, Roma, Johnathan , Noah, Sam were able to boil down these complicated problems into manageable steps. This is not non-profit engineering, this is not charity work. These are serious problems of finance, scale and user-experience. It's all done with a small team that constantly overcomes seemingly massive obstacles. Props to my fellow engineers. Gnite.
First, we are releasing a "community" section of the site. The purpose of the section is clear enough -- to foster a sense of community among the 300K plus Kiva lenders. The way we are going about this is somewhat incremental. We are starting Thursday by launching Lending Teams on the site. This is way overdue. Lending Teams provide a way for lenders to group themselves together around certain affinities or themes of their choosing. Lenders can then choose to "count" their loans to one of their teams and the teams performance is statistically tracked and compared with other teams.
We've been getting requests to help serve groups like schools, churches, book clubs, etc for over two years. It just took this long to get the feature up there because of our org's historical focus on getting partners signed up and reducing risk on the platform. User facing features were de-prioritized in 2007 and half of 2008 because of chronic inventory shortages. Supply and demand have stabilized in recent months. This spring, we started really prioritizing our lenders again and that will bear fruit in many ways between now and the end of the year.
We originally called the feature "Lending Groups" internally. That became problematic when we introduced "Borrowing Groups" (aka Groups) on the site at the end of last year. Instead of having two things called "Groups" on the site, we chose to cluster our lenders into so-called "Teams". This then led to a series of metaphor overextensions. We have Teams. You can "recruit" for your team, you can "quit" the team and you can be a "captain" of a team. You can even "bestow captainhood" to other members of the team you are on. That sounds a little medieval if you ask me. You can tell we had a little too much fun designing and coding....
Over the last few years, major websites, no matter what space, introduced some sort of social networking element to their service. Sometimes, social features are tacked on to businesses as an awkward appendage. Pretty late to the game is Kiva with the lending teams feature entering the fray as well. I'm hoping we do it right, and do it in our own unique way. My take on socializing on Kiva is that the socializing should come within the context of making loans. I don't desire for Kiva to become a dating site or a Facebook ripoff. However, I hope that we can leverage the basic human need to socialize for the higher cause of serving the working poor in this world. We will see if we can pull off that delicate balance and walk that fine line with grace.
Of course, the biggest risk is that we spent all this time and nobody will use it. Inactivity is the biggest enemy of any web-based business. Afterall, the vast majority of websites have little usage. Non-profit websites are particularly at risk. Activity is a rare gem. I'll be tracking that pretty closely on this blog in the weeks to come.
Maybe more exciting than our foray into social networking is a second feature we will release on Thursday -- increased liquidity. For the first time, our loans will begin repaying you -- the user -- throughout the loan term. Up until this point in time, users needed to wait until the end of a loan to receive Kiva Credit which they can withdraw, relend, gift or donate. Meanwhile, Kiva was receiving monthly wire transfers from our Field Partner MFIs and holding the cash in our bank account. The origin of this decision dates back to 2004 when we did not have the sophistication to settle payments more frequently. We've been working for most of the year to correct this decision. The result is that now, when Kiva actually receives the cash in our bank account we will allow our users to access these funds. I read somewhere once that increased liquidity is always good for a market. We will see if this axiom reigns true for the infantile marketplace of Kiva in the coming months. On Thursday, we will make about $10M in Kiva Credit liquid!
Piece by piece, we are assembling an awesome engineering team at Kiva. I didn't make these features happen, it was the team. In no particular order, Zvi, Jeremy, Roma, Johnathan , Noah, Sam were able to boil down these complicated problems into manageable steps. This is not non-profit engineering, this is not charity work. These are serious problems of finance, scale and user-experience. It's all done with a small team that constantly overcomes seemingly massive obstacles. Props to my fellow engineers. Gnite.
Fantastic progress
I'm looking forward to seeing what you've built and taking advantage of it to link with other Kiva users with similar interests, as well as those whom I know through other contexts. I also think that the boost in liquidity will make me (and others) do more lending, if in smaller amounts, and keep people engaged with Kiva. Congrats on all your progress.