A minor user-friendliness bug on Kiva

While I'm on the Kiva subject - one other feature they need to fix is the "invite friends" through "adding webmail contacts" feature. This feature dumps your entire contacts list from, e.g., Gmail into the cramped "To" field. You then have to go through the comma-separated list and delete all the contacts you don't want to include. They need to improve this to have a list with check-boxes or something. This was time consuming, boring and I was very close to skipping this alltogether.

It's a shame - because the idea is good, and the ways they try to build on people's social networks are very good. To give this posting a positive spin as well, some of the nicer features were:

• tracking of "accepted invitations" and how much these have lent - compared to the average Kiva user
• simple "copy-paste" code for promoting specific projects on your own web-site (photo of the loaner, his project and a green status bar on how much of his loan he has financed so far, all placed in a nice little Kiva banner)
• Facebook "causes" application

Put differently - they are definitely on the right track - but they need to fix the webmail contact-list feature.

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A missing, high-potential feature on the Kiva site

Yesterday I signed up for Kiva and tried to lend some money through the site. It's an excellent concept and extremely well executed - but they need to make a simpler, low-maintenance experience possible as well as the fully information-immersed one.

What I would like: I'd love a simplified option available for those who want to lend, but don't have the time or interest to go deeply into the details. Some people will want to - and that's fine - but others (and I suspect many of the people with lots of money to lend) will not. It should be possible to specify some broad characteristics of your desired portfolio (25% in Europe, 50% in Africa, 25% in Asia, for instance - all through partners with a rating of 3 or more stars) - and have the system fill this portfolio to the desired amount for you.

Also - automate this: Make it possible to save a set amount every month, used to increase the portfolio specified. Let me set a default of "re-lend funds as they become available" and specify trigger points for informing me about events (e.g., if default rate slips above xx, if the value in my local currency falls more than xx% through loan defaults or currency events).

I'm not saying this "low maintenance after initial setup" thing is easy to execute or make user-friendly and simple - but I think it is crucial to keep people lending over time as the initial curiosity and interest fade. Some will want to keep knowing the details - others just want to do good and once in a while see what they've accomplished at more aggregate levels.

Another idea in line with their user-involvement philosophy: Let the most interested users define portfolios with certain characteristics. Allow others to fund these portfolios - allow the portfoliomakers to create pages on Kiva promoting and explaining their portfolios and the reasoning behind them - and let them track the funds attracted and impact of their own portfolios. If it is possible to do this in a simple way - add user ratings of the portfolios and popularity/success KPIs. That way you can go to a portfolio page and choose ("Create your own," "see most popular" "see most successful" etc.).

What motivates this issue: Kiva strives to be a highly transparent website - and it is. The statistics and information provided are stunning. Not only do you know exactly which individual you are lending to (all funds for the operation of Kiva itself are solicited separately on a purely voluntary basis), and exactly which microfinance intermediary is linking you (with info and links to homepages etc.) - but you can see past borrowing history of the individual, aggregate statistics for the microfinance institution. To be a bit more systematic, you will find info about

• all of Kiva (total number of lenders, borrowers, funds raised, averages per lender on various dimensions, etc.)
• microfinance partners (months associated with Kiva, loans distributed, default rates etc.)
• countries (underneath each specific project is a series of aggregate social and other measures for that country)
• lenders (each lender has a profile page (anonymous if you wish) with statistics about your lending activities (distribution over geographies, gender, sector, default rates etc.)
• borrowers
• your own portfolio
• your own non-lending activities (for instance, how many friends you have invited, how many of them accepted, how many loans and what aggregate sums these have made available)

All in all - the information amount is massive. And that turns into a problem: The issue is not finding information, but avoiding it.

I'm not saying this is a major problem - but I actually ended up lending about $125 less than I was planning to. Why? Because finding and actually executing the loans took too long: Each loan has to be made separately and individually through a series of clicks. Everytime I wanted to make a loan I needed to go to a list of projects, click on one project, decide how much to give, go back to the list, click on another project, and so on. Sometimes the "lend" button limited me to $25 per project (to ensure that everyone would find projects to fund). Quite often the projects were filled by the time they loaded (even though they were on the "in need" list).

Granted, I browsed the "most popular" category of projects - but the site recommends that I start out lending to four- or five-star microfinance partners. These are the ones with a well-established track record, but when I tried going to the list of high-ranked partners and looking at their "in need" projects, these lists were mostly empty. Presumably because they are the most popular institutions. The practical way of finding them was therefore to look in the "most popular" category.

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Case in point: Microfinance over the internet

People in the west are selfish and materialistic because they are unaware of their own power. If you could save a bus from driving off a cliff and save 25 children you would do so - and rightly feel like a hero. If you knew that you could stop a disease from killing 25 children and saw clearly how this could be done with no big sacrifice on your part - then we believe you would do that as well. The problem is that you don't see this as a choice you are making, you don't know how you could achieve this in practice, and if you donated money to a charity then the heroic result would not feel real to you.

That's what we want to change with the LifeYears initiative, because we believe the web has the potential to make the available choices clear, present, simple and compelling.

An excellent example of this is the microfinance website Kiva. Through this site anyone with a credit card can lend money (starting from $25) through microfinance institutions directly to individuals in the developing world, see how their lending is spent on concrete, specific investments to help small businesses involving shoe sales, agriculture, food production/sales etc., and see pictures, read updates and track your portfolio as time goes by. In addition, aggregate statistics is shown on how many people have signed up the last week, how many projects have been funded the last week and at what total amounts etc.

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The LifeYears Initiative

Thousands of children could be saved with cheap, simple means. Whether it is vaccination or dirt-cheap treatments for childhood diarrhoea. Yet they still die. Why?

Our belief is that they die because we are not faced everyday with the choice of saving them.

"Charity" is this vague, abstract thing you can donate money to. You can buy a can of Coke, a DVD with Lord of the Rings, or "donate to charity". It's a different kind of thing altogether, and we don't think about it in our everyday lives. Even if we want to donate, where should we send the money? There is so much work involved in just getting an overview of the possible organizations and causes... And how do we know the money won't get lost on the way, or be spent on organizational overhead, or end up in the pockets of corrupt leaders in some foreign dictatorship? And if we actually do end up giving a little money away, then that's it and we can contentedly rest and not have to think about it any more. We've done our good deed - why should we need to do more?

The solution we are working for: Make "LifeYears" a consumer good:

* Give people the ability to "save a life year for $0.50"
* Give them their own account so they can collect "saved life years"
* Provide a host of payment options (through SMS services, on-line credit card, weekly "subscription" to life years, etc.)
* Make it extremely simple to find and understand information on how the money will actually end up saving life-years
* Channel all money to whatever charitable project willing to provide the needed numbers for life-year calculations and willing to commit to third-party auditing of numbers and results.
* Use all the web 2.0 tools to increase involvement ("Compare yourself/your country/your group to others" or "Design a viral marketing image or clip and compete to be voted part of the official LifeYearsInitiative material")
* Give people access to unique "stash" to create social proof (E.g., T-shirts stating that "I've saved 15 000 life years - what's your excuse?" or "$10: To you it's a movie. To him its 20 more years of life!")

What do we need to do? Get the concept up and running in a prototype form so we can test it. Then scale it up as quick as possible if it works. In other words, what we need right now is:

* Help with designing and building a web-application. It needs to be smooth, extremely simple - and allow for stuff like
o channeling of payments
o accumulation of lifeyear-points
o access to "charitable project key info" for participating projects
* Contacts in credible, charitable organizations to identify some first projects to include with project-specific bank account money can be channeled into

More will come as we start moving and see more clearly what we need - but for now: Get in touch and let's get started!