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Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a link to a website called How I Spent My Stimulus. Most of the posts are what you'd expect - trips to Cabo Wabo, trips to the dentist, trips to Home Depot, etc.

As I scanned down the page, I suddenly recognized one of the pictures as one of our borrowers! It seems Kiva Lender Dawson used his tax rebate to fully fund Patricia Tonumaivao. Nice one, Dawson - way to stimulate the Samoan economy ;)


-- posted by Jeremy Frazao at 05:02 PM PDT

Congratulations!!

Kiva is the Webby People's
Voice Winner for Charitable Organizations / Nonprofit!!

Thanks to everyone who voted for us!! It's certainly an honor to be chosen winner by the people, especially against such stiff competition.

Click here to learn more about The Webbys!

-- posted by Fiona Ramsey at 10:03 AM PDT

We've been nominated for a Webby People's Voice Award in the category of Society: Charitable Organizations / Non-Profit, but the competition is tough!

Vote now and help us win our first ever Webby Award!

1 - go to http://pv.webbyawards.com
2 - Click on "Register now". You will receive an activation code that will allow you to start voting.
3 - Once you're registered, you will see 4 ballots - click on Website (on the left)
4 - Scroll down to the section "Society" and click on "Charitable Organizations / Non-Profit"
5 - Cast your vote for Kiva.org!

Voting closes May 1 at midnight Eastern time.

Thanks for your support!

Fiona Ramsey

-- posted by Fiona Ramsey at 12:46 PM PDT

Well, almost one-click.

We?re adding a neat new feature when adding loans that allows lenders to drop loans into their baskets more easily. On Kiva's Lend and Home pages, there will now be a ?Lend $25? button which will quickly drop $25 of a loan into your basket. It?ll keep you on the same page, so you can go ahead and make more loans like this. Then, when you?re ready, you can proceed to your basket page to check out (or adjust the loan so it?s more than $25).

For those of you who prefer the experience of reading through the description in detail, you can still click on the entrepreneur photo or title to view the loan profile. We just thought this new feature would make it a little easier to move through the list of loans for those of you in a hurry.

You?ll be able to see this on the site in the next few days, so keep an eye out for it!

-- posted by Roma Jhaveri at 05:19 PM PDT

Last week, Matt and Premal visited Philadelphia, PA to share some magical moments in Kiva?s history. Upon arrival, the three of us had a warm visit with executives at Advanta headquarters in anticipation for the ?big night?. Hours later, we arrived at the official KivaB4B Launch Party in Center City hosted by Advanta. The celebration included international / world-class entertainment from a classical BharataNatyam performance, to a martial arts dance demonstration by a Brazilian Capoiera troop from Penn. To add to the excitement, Advanta flew in Kiva loan recipient, Senerita Lilli, who candidly shared her story as a Kiva borrower. Senerita, a Samoan dressmaker, and her husband were graciously hosted by Advanta for two weeks to help promote the KivaB4B partnership. Meeting a Kiva borrower in the US was a surreal moment for us - in the history of Kiva, Matt has only met a few borrowers in the field?but never did we imagine that a borrower would come see us here in the US.

The following day, the Penn Microfinance Club hosted a successful conference at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology, featuring industry leaders including Sam-Daley Harris, and Rupert Scofield. (What better place to have a MF conference; after all, poverty does belong museums, right?!) Matt and Premal?s ?tag-team style keynote? brought the house down; and the energy in the room was the perfect ingress to the microfinance reception that followed. Our greatest supporters to date, Halloran Philanthropies, co-hosted the evening reception with Kiva, which welcomed 200 students, lenders, and professionals. In fact, we even met some local ?KivaFriends?! Executive director of Halloran Philanthropies, Tony Carr, was SO impressed with the Capoiera demonstration from the previous night, he booked them on the spot! The performance stole the night and Premal even debuted his famous dance move, ?the worm?.

However, my favorite moment of the night was this: I was having a conversation with one of our KivaFriends, when she casually revealed that the first loan that she had ever made on Kiva was to a Samoan dressmaker. Immediately, we learned that this borrower was indeed Senerita Lilli, our guest from Samoa! This strange, yet fateful, coincidence confirms my belief in the power of connections and the foundation in which Kiva has been built. The lender and borrower embraced; and to me, that is magic.

On behalf of Kiva, we?re thankful to Advanta, Halloran Philanthropies, and Penn Microfinance Club for a wonderful few days in Philadelphia, PA.

- Rupa Modi

-- posted by Rupa Modi at 08:33 AM PDT

Ok, that title's pretty cheesy given what this post is about, but oh well. Basically, a little while ago, Jeremy (one of our engineers) found himself in the happy situation of having some Kiva Credit to spend. So, he made his way to the Kiva Lend page, ready to loan. When he got there, though, he found himself squinting at the pictures of the entrepreneurs because they're so small.

That's when his ingenuity kicked in and he decided to make the pictures a lot bigger. (Get it, "The Bigger Picture"?)

Anyway, the release with the bigger pictures should go live later this week. We think you'll appreciate the difference it makes to be able to see our entrepreneur photos so clearly. We've also spent the last couple weeks making our site architecture a lot more solid, so that our site will be more robust and scalable overall.

Another thing we've found is that a lot of loans are being repaid right about now -- so if you're one of the lucky people like Jeremy who finds themselves with a loan fully repaid and Kiva Credit ripe for the spending, be sure to put it to good use!

-- posted by Roma Jhaveri at 04:36 PM PDT

Congratulations Kiva!

We've been announced an Official Honoree for the Best Practices category in The 12th Annual Webby Awards, and nominated for the Charitable Organizations / Non-Profit category.

We're honored to be recognized by the Webby Awards, and looking forward to finding out the winners!

(Props to all Kiva engineers for working so hard on the website!)

-- posted by Fiona Ramsey at 10:29 PM PDT

Starting this week, Kiva will be sending out monthly reminders to all of you who have Kiva Credit sitting in your accounts. There are a few ways you can receive Kiva Credit; the most common are when a borrower fully repays her loan or someone gives you a Kiva gift certificate. Needless to say, unused Kiva Credit is money that isn't useful to anyone -- it's neither being used to lend to more entrepreneurs nor is it being used by the account holder for anything else. For more on this, see Matt's blog post at the beginning of March. Through reminding people to use their Kiva Credit, we can hopefully get to a point where this money is being put to good use.

If you're interested, some other changes you'll see on the site are in the "About" section (incidentally, we've updated our Team->Volunteers page, so there's an updated list of all of the people who help make Kiva run). We're also continuing to work on improving the site for our Field Partners to more easily post and maintain entrepreneur profiles with Kiva.

-- posted by Roma Jhaveri at 11:37 AM PDT

Come to the Punch Line Comedy Club in San Francisco Monday night to see the hilarious Yayne Abeba, Clark Taylor, Nico Santos, Ali Wong and more.

Tickets proceeds from this show benefit Kiva.org - what better way to feel good (and start the work week.)

She show starts at 8:00pm, doors open at 7:00pm.

Punch Line Comedy Club is at 444 Battery Street, San Francisco.
For more info call: 415.397.4337

You'll even see some Kiva staff there!

-- posted by Fiona Ramsey at 06:41 PM PDT

Hi there,
We?re getting ready to roll out another release later this week, and we just wanted to send out a heads up before our new features hit the shelves.

One thing we?ve been pushing pretty hard lately is invitations. We need people to invite their friends/families/anyone they think would be interested in lending on Kiva so that we can get more entrepreneurs funded. So, we?ve done a couple things in this release:

1. Changed the ?Thanks for Lending? page to emphasize inviting your friends as a next step. We?ve also included a contact importer here to make it easier to send out to people in your address book.


2. Included your successful, public invitees on your public lender page. For an example, take a look at www.kiva.org/lender/jessica
   

FYI ? You can play around with our existing invitation functionality if you go to ?Invites? while visiting ?My Portfolio.?

The other bit that?s exciting is that we?ve gotten around to providing functionality to protect entrepreneurs? last names and locations at the request of the field partner. This means that if a field partner thinks that it is unsafe to list an entrepreneur?s entire name or village on the Internet, Kiva can hide that information.

The final thing I'll call out is that our engineers got creative and decided to add a neat new widget on the home page which will show the latest public transaction on Kiva. The RSS feed for this is coming soon?

-- posted by Roma Jhaveri at 10:35 AM PDT