Kiva.org – Social banking for the third world

www.Kiva.org

Kiva.org is the great example of a win/win scenario in a web2 world. The only losers here and those with “traditional business models”.
It is a project that is great for the community, is rewarding to all users and its founders. I will not go into detail on what it does I would encourage you to check it out for yourself… I will wait a moment while you do.

Go check out: www.kiva.org

See my profile at: www.kiva.org/lender/masonfok

There are a great many things that Kiva.org is doing extremely right and I will try and summarize over a few below in case you cannot see them.

Its business model appears sound and it contains all the elements required of a successful online social engagement.

They offer users a Profile page that provides a publicly viewable summary of my participation.
These both give recognition to the one investing but more importantly it builds a social interaction that fosters further use. Encouragement is received by viewing the profiles of others. (Call it mob mentality if you will)

They are consistent with their calls to action. Referring friends is critical to its growth and they understand how to enable their users to do this with very little effort.

Grouping people into Community “Teams” is also encouraging communication between likeminded users. This has also created a low pressure competitive environment as your participation is both credited to your profile and your designated team. The “Team” concept and consistent communication would also have a significant impact in the frequency of participation.

Finally, the people behind the curtain I think are fantastic. Consider this: If you where an online payment processing facility and your job was to develop new business. What would you do?
Do you spend millions on billboards and radio, or do you apply a little lateral thinking?

Matt Flannery

Kiva.org is the first and possibly only website that has a fee-free account with PayPal. The Kiva.org boards are also loaded with PayPal executives. Matt Flannery the CEO and co-founder has done well to identify the potential of a Kiva/PayPal relationship and PayPal have done even better by recognising it. Kiva/PayPal has been able to facilitate something great, a peer-to-peer finance network that is completely win/win.

At the time of writing this 493,422 people in 185 countries have used the PayPal service as part of their Kiva.org experience. How much marketing would a “traditional” business have to do in order to generate such a large and wide user base?

I think now more than ever it is risky to be “traditional”. Encourage lateral thinking in your business and you never know what you could achieve. If someone came to you with a concept as alternative as kiva.org was in the early days, would you have given it the time it deserved?