How a team of 5 mobilizes 400 volunteers to review 220,000 Kiva loans each year
As technology brings us ever closer together, we are bearing witness to the collective power of the crowd — not only to fund dreams, ideas and initiatives, but to accomplish tasks and create new products. At Kiva, we simply could not have the impact we have in the world without the global corps of volunteers who help make it happen. We have to be smart about how we organize and leverage Kiva’s talented volunteers, and we’ve created technical solutions we hope other organizations can learn from as well.
The scale of the challenge
Through Kiva, lenders crowdfund an average of $10 million in loans every month. With loan amounts trending somewhere between $250 and $2,500–and each loan featuring a different borrower, anywhere between 17,000–22,000 unique profiles from over 80 countries can appear on the site in a 30-day period.
Each loan description must be thoroughly reviewed to ensure it complies with Kiva’s policies. Most require some editing to clean up the grammar and ensure the description is coherent. A few thousand require an English translation from Spanish, French, Russian, or Portuguese each month. With the exception of a handful of the loans that appear on the site, the vast majority are reviewed by a volunteer that will likely never set foot in a Kiva office.
Kiva’s Review and Translation Program (RTP) is comprised of over 400 volunteers around the world who review, edit, and translate the 17,000+ loan descriptions that fundraise on the site each month. With the exception of 3 staff members, and 2 interns who are also volunteers, the program itself exists on volunteer power–volunteers that will likely never meet each other or Kiva staff.
This means that every volunteer must be empowered not only to review their own loans, but they must also be able to work together to resolve questions and flag issues.
Tech solutions allow remote screening and training
Kiva’s mission attracts volunteer editors and translators looking for ways to contribute beyond lending.
While turning down offers of help may seem strange –especially to the person offering the help – Kiva is strengthened through a volunteer screening process. Right from the start, volunteers must demonstrate their adeptness at using online resources and their eye for detail by completing an online exercise in the initial application. This is facilitated by Greenhouse, an applicant tracking system, and it helps RTP identify initial program fit in about 30 seconds — before putting the volunteer through additional screening. Most volunteers pass this first step.
As a secondary measure, we send all volunteers a language test. In addition to testing their skills in editing and/or translation (which most volunteers demonstrate fairly easily), we also measure their ability to follow direction (which can sometimes prove more challenging). Again, because RTP volunteers won’t visit the office or receive in-person training, they must demonstrate a high degree of self-sufficiency in learning and applying Kiva’s standards.
Standardization ensures quality, and our training documentation is shared across Confluence, an Atlassian team collaboration knowledge base, and Google Docs. Every volunteer is trained 1 on 1 by a Kiva staff member, which makes the experience personal and unique, but each volunteer must receive similar training in order to ensure that they are equipped to review Kiva loan descriptions and know how to get their questions answered. Kiva engineers built the internal loan review platform, Viva, where volunteers review loans; this same platform also houses training loans.
We throw the kitchen sink at trainees. The loan descriptions are complex — with poor and unclear grammar — and they have multiple issues that need to be flagged. Typically, after reviewing 6 loans, trainees are ready to review live loan descriptions that are rarely ever that complicated. Using Viva, they review loans uploaded in Kiva’s Partner Admin system (PA2) by international Field Partners from the over 80 countries in which Kiva facilitates lending — typically within a few days after the partner submits the loan.
Empowering volunteer leaders allows for scale
Since the training wheels are now off, we must ensure that volunteers can be self-reliant while also getting the support they need when they have questions.
Enter a bit of strategy. Every volunteer is assigned a team with a team leader, who is also a volunteer. Team leaders disseminate information to their teams as a collective, but they also set aside time to establish personal relationships with their team members via email. They encourage and recognize their individual contributions. Again, everyone is remote, and while teams are great at “breaking up” volunteers for ease of overall operations, we still want to foster a collective community atmosphere, which is why we use the tool Colibri.
Colibri is a community platform, hosted by Forumbee, where we house Kiva’s policy and glossary resources. With the same tool, we are also able to build community by hosting discussion boards. Community discussion boards allow for transparency and collaboration.
We estimate that 90% of all questions are posted on Colibri, versus sent via email, and 75% overall are answered by other volunteers. Many are answered by community experts, which is a small cohort of knowledgeable volunteers who could likely go head-to-head with any staff member on Kiva policy. The community expert program was founded by a volunteer, and it frees up Kiva’s limited resources to focus on other areas. In addition to getting their questions answered on Colibri, volunteers share pictures from their travels and bond over light-hearted conversation. Some take the same online courses, and a few discuss deep philosophical questions.
Tech allows us to engage collectively and individually
Kiva volunteers are so wonderful, they would review loan descriptions in spreadsheets if that were the only available option. And they have! But Viva, the internal tool built by Kiva engineers, is designed to allow volunteers to easily set goals and track their progress toward meeting loan review targets. We try to inject a bit of fun into the system by challenging volunteers to meet thresholds and achieve both number-based and time-based milestones. While this adds a sense of accomplishment for volunteers who enjoy these features, it also promotes the more important task of placing loans on the site for funding a few days after they are submitted by Kiva’s international Field Partners.
We track these metrics and hundreds more in Looker, a business intelligence and data analytics platform. Looker allows us to pull and slice data in multiple ways so we know when volunteers are due a special acknowledgement or intervention. We can look up anything from lending dollars activated to number of words reviewed — individually, by language, or across teams.
Because volunteers’ opinions and experiences are invaluable to Kiva, we use SurveyMonkey to elicit their feedback and suggestions. We also use it to calculate RTP’s Net Promoter Score. While certainly not the only measure of user satisfaction, a score above 50 indicates users are generally happy with a product or service. (The Review and Translation Program tracks around 61, which is about where Amazon is these days.) SurveyMonkey also allows us to surface ingenious ideas from volunteers, like enhancing the search functionality on Colibri or creating integrated glossaries so volunteers can review loans in Viva without leaving the site to look up a term. Both features we’re currently exploring!
With the way RTP is set-up today, we could potentially add another 200 volunteers without fundamentally changing the structure of the program. We realize, however, that while the addition of volunteers may not necessitate an overall expansion, it would augment the responsibilities of other volunteers. Additionally, we constantly balance the forces between estimated loan posting volume and loans available for funding on the site. There is a tension between overwhelming volunteers with too much to do and ensuring that there are enough loans for everyone to have a satisfying volunteer experience.
This is why we are both judicious in using data and tempering it with compassion when it may be time for volunteers to take time away from volunteering for Kiva. The natural phase-out of volunteers is healthy both for the volunteers and for any organization. No one should feel obligated to offer their services for free in perpetuity, and taking time away allows other volunteers to step in and provide fresh perspectives.
Volunteers built this program, and they continue to build it with every loan reviewed and every discussion board post. We at Kiva continually work to leverage the technology that will not only allow them to be self-sufficient, but will allow us to recognize their individual and collective efforts in achieving more impact for borrowers around the world.
Want to learn more or interested in applying? Check out Kiva’s Review and Translation Program!
Note: the original publication of the title read 250,000 loans reviewed each year; the correct number is 220,000. The correction is not reflected in the URL.
