Kiva-Level Devotion on a Craigslist for Service?

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published December 17, 2008 @ 08:32AM PT

Women in Bangladesh waiting to repay microloans. Source.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark wrote a column on the Huffington Post a few days ago about how the Obama administration could foster deeper civic engagement. One of his bullet points reads: "You might have some cash you'd like to pool with others to get something done. Sites which make that happen include DonorsChoose.org, funding classroom projects, or Kiva.org, which provides micro-finance loans to small businesspeople."

I've linked before to articles about how dangerous it is to assume you can adapt elements of Kiva's model and still get their special sauce. On a panel called "awareness2action" a few nights ago, Kiva president Premal Shah very humbly said the same, pointing out that there wasn't anything they did particularly to get Bill Clinton to decide that he was going to do publicity for them everywhere he went.

With Kiva though, it's not the publicity alone that has driven their growth. It's the peculiar combination of ingredients including the one-to-one connection, the idea of loan repayment, the huge buzz around microfinance after Muhammad Yunus' Nobel Prize, and more.

There is one ingredient that I think is not as often mentioned but extremely powerful, which is just how fast your small contribution accomplishes the goal. I was reading a critique of video games somewhere a few days ago that suggested that the real problem is that they create a perception of the world in which specific sets of inputs always produce an intended output. People get rewarded for figuring out the specific, replicable elements that accomplish the task, which, the article contends, is just not how the world necessarily works.

At the awareness2action event, Premal mentioned that it takes, on average, 1.5 days for a loan request to be completely filled after posting. That's incredible. Rather then just having to hope or assume that your twenty bucks actually does what it's intended to do, within 36 hours of your investment you've actually tangibly impacted a life. That's powerful stuff.

The interesting thing of course is that within the microcredit context, the social mission of the loan giver is not the activity the loan receiver undertakes with their credit, it's the fact of being able to access that credit and undertake the activity at all. In other words, the moment that the loan request is completely filled is the moment that the social mission of the lender becomes complete. This may be an irrepricably fast social return on investment.

To some extent, organizations like The Point are trying to help people come together to achieve a similar type of satisfaction (not to mention impact) in different arenas. The Point enables you to agree to contribute some resource of yours - time, money, whatever - to a specific goal, if and only if a certain threshold deemed necessary to achieve the goal is reached. For example, their approach to microloans would be that they would allow you to pledge how much you would give to a person requesting $1000 if you could be assured that the $1000 threshold would be reached. The Point is set up to only charge you if that threshold is reached.

I think its a model that has a huge amount of promise. My question is what are other types of mission-focused activities that have the potential for a quick social return on investment? Is there low-hanging fruit to bring Kiva-level devotion to other types of social benefit activity?