Social Media in Action: Kiva Tells All

Social media has served Kiva well. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn allow the microfinance organization to gain product insight by interacting with clients, and reach diverse types of audiences - from industry professionals and philanthropists to technically savvy individuals. Twitter, for one, provided a venue for people to defend and show support to Kiva amid a growing controversy following a blog by David Roodman. The Center for Global Development research fellow said Kiva’s microlending is “partly fictional.” One Twitter post read: “I’m a little surprised at the ‘uproar’ about kiva lately. didn’t we all already know the $ goes to MFIs? Kiva just tells the story better.” Such involvement by Kiva supporters is what Chelsa Bocci hopes to spread even more. As director of community marketing, Bocci manages community growth and engagement through Kiva’s lending teams, social networks and events. Devex sat down with Bocci to learn more about the organization’s’ social media strategy, the pros and cons of social media, and efforts to improve transparency with customers following Roodman’s article. Why does Kiva need a social media platform? Kiva values the idea that social media exists today. We couldn’t do what we do without social media. I work in the marketing area of Kiva, which has a zero-dollar budget. So, when we try to think creatively and set strategic goals about how we want to grow our user base and increase community outreach and really try to drive new traffic to our Web site, social media has incredible tools to help us do that. We have a strong Facebook presence, and also in Twitter. We have three channels that we use. We have three communities that we focus on growing, three channels of social media [LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter]. We really do value social media in general because [of] lack of budget, and Kiva is a nonprofit and don’t ever plan to be a for-profit. So, we’re always going to need to think creatively about how to get the word out there and how to bring people to our site. Do you feel that your strategy is kind of layers of different tools? Do the different social media tools work hand in hand? I do think of it actually, as in layers - I would say - if I was going to outline the different tools that we use not only to raise awareness in communities of Kiva, but also to kind of share updates. Maybe we have a new feature, and we want to get the word out about that. Maybe there’s a new event coming up, and we want a large attendance. Anything. So, the channels that we really focus on tend to be Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. And I do kind of couple them together in the way that we use them, although we’ve found that there are very different communities [on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook]. LinkedIn tends to be our professional, microfinance-based community more so than the Web 2.0 savvy community on Twitter. So, that’s been really helpful in relation to the updates, and we definitely take that into consideration. Some of the other things we do is really growing our blog. We have about 20,000 unique viewers that come every month. My strategy is to, as much as I can, to always direct people back to our Web site. We really want to bring the view back to the home base because, at the end of the day, the call to action is really to make loans on Kiva. And while I love Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, I don’t think they’re as effective, if we’re just putting [it] out there - it’s all about output. So, what I like to do is to post any sort of message on [an] event, update a future announcement up on Kiva’s blog first and foremost, and then I link people back to Kiva’s blog from all our other channels [social media sites]. Is that the approach you’re also taking with Twitter? Unless it’s a direct call to action, and we’re running a campaign, and we’re asking people to do something directly. Sometimes, it’s easier to do a direct link, so there aren’t a bunch of click-throughs. If there are informative updates and it’s an awareness update, then I might do a couple of tweets about that just to make it more personal, and I’ll include a link to direct people back to the Web site. What analytics tool are you using for the “In the Field” blog? We use Google Analytics [for blog analysis] and post our blogs with Blogger.com. It [“Kiva Chronicles”] has even more traffic than the Matt Flannery [blog], [our] CEO’s blog, which is hosted by SocialEdge, sponsored by Blogger, [which has 300,000 some odd users]. How has social media overall impacted Kiva’s success? One of the difficult things is measuring, always. It always comes back to measuring and tracking results when you’re using social media channels, Twitter, LinkedIn, for example. On our Facebook page, for example, we are challenged by that [one analytic with limited metrics on Facebook]. We believe that these tools are a great way to build brand awareness, but I don’t think we’re totally convinced that it’s growing the dollar amount of loans on Kiva. We’re in this interesting space right now. We’re definitely using them as a marketing tool, but we’re trying to reach our strategic goals on the lender side, funneling money every month up to our microfinance partners. We don’t have any reason to believe there’s any strong correlation. In 2010, [we hope to] figure out a way that we can more effectively measure [such impact]. For example, if we grow our presence on Facebook, does that mean two things: one, more dollars in the door at Kiva, and, No. 2, that we’ll get more friend referrals on Facebook? Does that mean they are more excited about referring us to one of their friends? We’re not sure. We’ll do lender surveys at the beginning of next year. We’re prioritizing that for next year. Would you have the capacity to build an analytic tool in-house? We don’t have the capacity to do something like that right now, and whether we want to prioritize to do something like in the budget for 2010. We just hired a director of analytics. This was an exciting hire for Kiva. The analytics is the thing that has always been a big challenge for us. There is so much demand, and we just don’t have the resources to provide all of that. It’s baby steps. I’d like to think that we’re going to think about expanding our efforts. … I’m wondering if that’s going to come down to engineering resources as well. We’ve also recently launched Kiva’s API, [which leaves all Kiva’s Web site code open and available to computer developers to work creatively with and build tools to help Kiva work more efficiently,] so there’s a really strong and growing developer community that can pull code from Kiva’s Web site to help build applications and fund tools, and a lot of that will help us in the area of analytics. And there’s so many willing volunteers out there; they just needed access to our code. That’s a good example of crowdsourcing for us. Can you talk about how Kiva is using crowdsourcing? Kiva is all about crowdsourcing. We have over 400 volunteers that sit all around the globe that are given limited access to the back-end of our Web site, and they are in charge of edit and translate all the profiles on the site that you see on the Web site. We definitely could not do all that we do without our incredible group of volunteers. We’re always coming up with creative ways to crowdsource to provide opportunities for Kiva lenders to build their engagement with Kiva. For example, we just created earlier this year a lending team playbook. It’s a way for people who really love Kiva to start their own lending team. It includes tools, materials and resources on how they can grow their lending team on Kiva. And that can all be found on the community tab on our Web site. I saw the “Finance Access Initiative” blog by Abby Gray coming to Kiva’s defense about David Roodman’s article. I thought that was a great example of social media in action. I was wondering initially, did you think that you wanted to do a social media campaign after Roodman’s article came out? That wasn’t the top priority when David Roodman’s article came out. I mean, social media campaign can mean so many different things, and I want to better understand what you’re asking. There were a lot of goals that were set after that article came out, and, for the most part, we welcome this kind of publicity because it’s all about asking the right questions, and I think it gives Kiva an opportunity to answer some of those. It’s been a very positive thing for us. We’re using the social media channel a lot to bring more awareness to some of those articles, and some of the follow-up questions, and bloggers we’ve seen taking an interest in some of the things we have going on. We didn’t set up to do a formal campaign around that publicity, but we have definitely been using those channels to direct or educate our existing community on how we view the situation. What was your initial strategy? If not social media, what was your communications strategy, because what you learned from this and your approach could be greatly helpful to another organization that encounters this kind of situation? The thing that we value more than anything else is engaging the existing community. We set up a community call. We used our social media channels to really get the word out - a conference call so people could dial in from anywhere, and anyone could call into. Matt was included, as well as our general council. [We said:] “Let’s address some of aspects brought up in the article.” We also had Tim Hassett, [our] portfolio and risk director on the call. Then, we hosted that call. We took that community call - we actually have a monthly community call - and then all those recordings were put up on the blog. And what value above all else is transparency. So, we wanted to be sure that the community on board about how and why we are responding to these things. So, I used some of our channels to draw new Kiva users to some of these discussions. We saw a lot of interest in the recording in the weeks to follow. And when there was a response to that [a blog], it was put up on the blog. What did you learn from the Roodman experience? Honest, honest answer is that we’re still learning. Every month is new time for us. Things change and grow so quickly. The joke internally is that today is short term, tomorrow is medium term, and the next day is long term. But it’s really hard to plan because we’re growing so fast. Everyone around here would absolutely agree that they highly value what we do to grow our social media presence. Again, back to the challenge of tracking and metrics, that is where I’m tasked to get creative and really put some thought into it. I think it’s been a wonderful experience, and we’re headed in the right direction. But, that being said, we have a lot of work to do. So, you are working with program developers to create new tools and doing lenders’ surveys. Are there any other projects in the pipeline using other forms of social media such as video? I was going to add something to the list that is not directly related to social media question. We are very focused engaging our users [to give] more feedback on our Web site. This is something that Kiva’s strategy is very interested in doing in the coming year. So, we’re looking at the flow of lending process, and the gift card lending services - those types of things. So, we’re going to be doing a lot of lenders’ surveys, as I mentioned. And I would bring social media back into this by saying that, it’s the best way for us to reach a lender community and much greater response to these core questions. At the end of the day, we want to hear from the less-than-average Kiva user, not somebody that is intimately familiar with our model; that it’s super easy for them and the process just flows. We want to hear from someone who’s just learning about Kiva for the first time. Maybe they hear about [Kiva] on Twitter, and then the next thing they show up on our Web site. And you know, what was the user experience like for them? Have you thought about doing live stream? We’ve tried doing a video conference, but we found it was a technical hassle for us. … We’ll entertain that idea more down the line. There’s been talk of a Kiva documentary. Eliza Villarino contributed to this report.