Tuesday, March 18, 2008

This Week on Kiva

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…