Kiva.org Needs Better Twitter Integration (A Micro Case Study)

It can sometimes be difficult to explain to friends and family the power of Twitter, so I’ve resorted to telling them the following story. Furthermore, this story serves as a micro case study as to why Kiva.org needs better social media integration.

How We Raised $550 for a Lady in Cambodia in 7 Hours Using 8 Tweets

Back in August of this year, I teamed up with a good friend, Mike Berner (@michaelberner), to run an experiment involving twitter and the micro-lending website, Kiva.org. For those that don’t already know, Kiva is a lending platform that allows individuals to make small loans to impoverished entrepreneurs around the world to help them start or grow businesses.

Mike and I decided to contribute a total of $125 to a young woman in Cambodia, name Mouen Sory, to help her expand her fish vending business and take care of her 3 children. However, after our $125 contribution, Mouen still needed to raise an additional $550 to reach her original loan request.  Enter our Kiva – Twitter fund raising experiment.

The experiment: Raise the remaining $550 of the loan using twitter to direct people to a blog posting about the campaign and encourage them to lend through the Kiva.org webpage.

The results: 8 tweets and 7 hours later the entirety of Mouen Sory’s Kiva loan had been funded! The small amount of time it took to accomplish this is a testament to the power of twitter both as a platform and as a network of engaging users willing to retweet and promote worthwhile causes to their personal networks!

My reason for telling this story is to 1) harp the benefits of social media as a tool for philanthropic fund raising, and 2) encourage Kiva.org to integrate twitter (and other social media) into their platform.

With a few simple snippets of code, every person that makes a Kiva loan could be presented with the option to ping their facebook friends and twitter followers with something like this:

If anyone from Kiva is reading this, I’d love to see it happen! And, I’m sure there are plenty of socially conscious developers out there willing to give you a hand. If you need help recruiting a few, I’d be happy to ask around. Shoot me a message via @allenburt, or leave a comment on this posting.