MESSAGING THE KIVA PROGRAM - ELIZABETH INGHAM

My name is Elizabeth Ingham, Kiva Rochester Assistant Program Coordinator, and after graduating Wells College in 2017 I joined the Kiva Rochester team. While in college, I took a semester to work with Kiva down in NYC, so I was excited to support a Kiva program in my hometown. As a Flower City AmeriCorps member, I have had the privilege of working with the Innovation Team for just over a year. Angela Rollins gives a great run down of Kiva Rochester, so if you haven’t yet, check it out here. AmeriCorps VISTAs focus on building sustainability, while Flower City AmeriCorps focus on day-to-day operations.
 
Over lunch one day, Angela and I were discussing how to make our communication more effective when Kate May recommended that we read the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Cass Sunstein and Rochester’s own Richard Thaler. The book offered insights that were used to improve our messaging to Kiva applicants, resulting in more and higher quality applications.

Since then, we have made consistent revisions to our email messaging, and reworked our handouts and informational materials. Still, our Kiva borrowers kept coming back with the same questions and hitting similar roadblocks. I had been using one-on-one meetings to help guide the customer through the Kiva process and doling out worksheets as the customer needed them, but I needed a better way to get the information out.  My solution was the creation of a new handout, A Guide to Kiva Rochester Small Business Loans, with a conscious balance of design and function. The idea of this book is that any business owner or aspiring business owner can pick it up and be as successful as possible when applying, fundraising, and repaying through Kiva.
 
A few Kiva applicants have used drafts of the book to help them, and so far the response has been positive. We are making physical copies available in all of the local libraries, a digital PDF available online for free, and distributing copies to many of our Rochester area partners. Hopefully, with its official release more of Rochester's entrepreneurs will be able to use Kiva Rochester to grow their businesses, and the Rochester community.