Blog: Microfinance

Creating a Success Online Community that Gets Returns

Premal Shah, the president of Kiva, talked yesterday about some of the ways that Kiva's online platform engages people and has created a community of microfinance lenders and borrowers.

Kiva connects small business owners in developing countries with micro lenders around the world through an online platform. The business owners, usually working through their micro bank on the ground in their country, post information about their business, their business plan, and the amount of money they want to borrow to make it happen. Lenders around the world can go to the site, decide who they want to lend to, and then lend the money using their credit cards (and in amounts as low as $25). Borrowers then pay the money back to the lenders over time. 

It's a simple idea, and it's run on an online platform that facilitates the whole business. Premal ran through some of the strategy behind the system. Much of what he said echoes what we tell our clients who are trying to engage a community online and is relevant to every organization trying to do so. Here are a few of the points I find most important.

• Highlight the people in your community. Kiva posts big pictures of its small business owners along with their background, their business plan, and the amount they want to borrow, and lenders can create a profile that the business owners and other lenders can see. This goes a long way in helping people get to know one another and bridging the physical gap between them.

  It also shows off some of their successes.

Getting Webforms Into Arabic and Other Right-to-Left Languages

Ever think about trying out Drupal's right-to-left (RTL) language support for languages like Arabic or Hebrew? We got to test it out for a project we're working on with the SEEP Network, a support system for microfinance and microenterprise communities around the world. Currently they're working to build the capacity and improve the services and performance of organizations within national and regional-level networks of microfinance institutions. To get feedback on their efforts and track changes that occur, they needed a tool that would allow members of these networks to give them feedback directly. And since these members speak many different languages - including RTL languages like Arabic - we got to try out Drupal's support for this while building their survey tool.

The key to RTL language support in Drupal 5 is the internationalization module (i18n), and Jose reminded me that there's a great documentation page on using RTL languages on Drupal sites here. 

In a nutshell, the i18n module allows you to define a language as being a right-to-left language. Then when the site is being viewed in that RTL language, you can make your theme aware of this fact and have it call different or additional CSS stylesheets in order to theme according to the direction of the language. In the case of this webform, we were simply able to call an additional stylesheet after all the other stylesheets were called, which adjusted all the text from left-to-right to right-to-left.