Kiva Communities

Inspiration

For the Kiva Fall 2021 Hackathon, our team set out to explore the question, “How might we show the impact of loans?” We found that many Kiva lenders have funded loans in the past but have since become inactive. In talking to these lenders, we discovered an opportunity. People would lend more often if they felt personally connected —connected to borrowers, connected by seeing the impact they’ve personally made and connected by contributing toward a shared goal.

What it does

Our solution is Kiva Communities, a way to unite lenders around a shared cause and match them with borrowers that align with what they stand for.

We know it can be difficult to choose which loans to fund. That’s why we developed a profile creation tool that matches lenders with a specific lending community based on their preferences and Daily Match, a feature that serves up one new borrower every time a lender logs into their account.

From the lender’s redesigned personal homepage, they can see an overview of the community’s impact and their personal contributions. They can also see recent activities and updates from borrowers they’ve funded, and can interact with words of encouragement or congratulations on achievements.

Lastly, the community dashboard offers a visual way to view the collective and personal impact made toward common goals and can be viewed over chosen periods of time.

How we built it

We designed the prototype in Figma, used Google Forms for surveys, FigmaJam for collaboration, Zoom for interviews and created the final video in Adobe After Effects.

Challenges we ran into

It was challenging to define a single problem to solve. We had many ideas for how to make loaning more impactful in the future and how to visualize the current impact of loans, but we had to merge those ideas together and ultimately pick one to focus on. We spent more time in the ideation phase generating ideas to solve our problem that we could have spent designing the final output.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are a team of former UX/UI boot camp students and TAs. We’re proud that we came together as a group after our program ended to work together again in a new way. We’re also proud that we took the problem statement beyond simply showing impact, and thought more broadly about how to increase an individual lender’s overall impact. This required us to understand why people stop lending in the first place, so that we could come up with a way to re-engage lenders thus increasing the cumulative impact of loaning money through Kiva.

What we learned

We learned that it can be difficult to make system-wide changes to the way Kiva lenders interact with borrowers because local lending partners don’t have consistent ways of working with borrowers. For example, we wanted to create a more robust messaging system between lenders and borrowers but we learned that it would be too complex to create a way for both parties to dialogue so we had to simplify our idea to focus on messages the lender would send to the borrower.

What's next for Kiva Communities

The next step for Kiva Communities is to continue building out the community element between lenders and the borrowers they support. We see opportunities to integrate video or audio journals to strengthen the personal investment in borrower’s stories, to feature borrower/lender pair stories on the community dashboard and to create a messaging board for community members to interact with each other. We also want to incorporate a way for lenders to earn achievement badges for each community they support and to display them on their personal home page.