MilePointers team goals

Revised suggestions for August goals

• $200,000 total loan amount ($24,400 in new loans)
• 4,000 loans
• 375 members total

Sound good?

Sounds good to me. What do other people think? August is unlikely to be a big month for much of anything other than holidays, pretty much worldwide.

Yes, I just posted my reply to this effect in the other thread.

Sounds good. I do however think we'll see about 210k. Not sure what happened at the end of July, but in general 30-35k a month is what we've been doing.

I suspect you may be correct. We have not done as well as we have expected for new members, though. In the measures of our impact of new loans and amount loaned, though we have done extremely well. Our commitment to our cause is very clear. It would be nice to have even more of us, though, wouldn't it?

Nice! I think that's pretty impressive considering how relatively young Milepoint is.

So that was at the end of June.

As of today, we are 58th in all-time money lent across all teams and 13th all-time in Common Interest.

Keep it going!

Thanks for keeping track of these metrics. They really do show how much we are accomplishing in our infancy. As Randy points out frequently. Milepoint Cares!

Time for a small recap of our past goals. We are a little optimistic about the number of members. Still, we kick some serious butt! Just check this list:

Cool! We've met all the goals so far except for a couple of member recruitment goals. Keep it up!

...it's time to find new goals for September!

My suggestions:

• $225,000 total loan amount
• 4,500 loans
• 375 members total

I'm sure we can go above $225k though... is $230k realistic?

We had been doing 30-35k a month. But August was a bit light. So 25k-30k might be a good goal.

We have missed loan number and member goals, but have done well on loan amounts.

I'd be inclined to go with the $230,000 while sticking with your other goals.

Does this mean that some of our big contributors are frequently putting in more than $25 per loan? If so, and if this stat matters to us, we could urge people to split their contributions among the maximum number of loans. It's more work to select the loans but it's also more diversification. (I'm not even sure I know how to make bigger loans on the Kiva website without making several $25 loans to the same person.)

When you choose someone you want to lend to, you see the big orange button "Lend $25" Just to left of that button, it says, in very small letters, "select amount to lend". If you click on the gray arrow, you will see many different amounts you can choose.
Our team's average loan size is about $53. The average Kiva loan is $33.

But if we want our "number of loans by the team" stats to look good, shouldn't we be encouraging members to put $25 into each loan and make more loans for the same amount of money invested? At an average of $53 per loan, we could have more than twice as many loans.

Personally I feel more dollars invested contributes more to the world than a higher loan count.

Of course, but the issue is, given the team statistics defined by Kiva, should be encourage MP team members to make more loans for the same amount of money or (implicitly) fewer loans for the same amount of money?

The biggest challenge is to help people establish a lifestyle of giving.

I'd focus on that and not worry about the loan count too much. The net effect is the same, loans are funded and new loan offer’s move up to the top.

(I personally give $25 per loan – but that is a pain if you are doing a large funding.)

Of course all of this is true, but my point is that IF PEOPLE HAVE DECIDED HOW MUCH TO CONTRIBUTE and GIVEN HOW KIVA DEFINES TEAM STATS, are we perhaps losing unnecessarily on team rankings by not encouraging people to fund each loan they make at the standard $25 level and therefore on average make more loans for our team? If we can easily raise our loan count on the Kiva team stats, shouldn't we do so? (This presumes that we care at all about team rankings and there's an argument there that we shouldn't either. By your argument we should ignore anything with the team and simply fund some loans individually to do good.....)

I question if it is important to try to inflate that number even if it is one of three possible goals. There are huge advantages to having new members and more money, I just don’t see the advantage to having more loans if it reflects the same investment volume.

Isn't it similarly inflating the numbers if someone joins Kiva and joins the MP KIva team but doesn't make a loan? This seems to also be "allowed" by the way Kiva defines its team stats AFAIK.

Personally I can think of few goals less worthy than to try to inflate our stats. For me, this is not about stats. It is about doing what feels best to me. There are many, many good reasons , at times, to loan large amounts of money. For one thing, it helps Kiva out by keeping their expenses down.
If we're doing this to look good stat-wise, we do not have the best motivation.
And personally I feel that amount loaned is way more important than number of loans.

I must agree with you, with one exception. The stats are not an end in and of themselves, we hope, but they do offer a useful reference and help us motivate ourselves and each other. Is not that true?

Yes, whatever inspires each person is great. I enjoy watching our team's totals climb. I enjoy watching my own totals climb. I just felt the need to emphasize the wonderful human connections that happen via Kiva, because there a lot of other ways that I could invest or donate my money that don't have the same personal touch.
As much as I enjoy our team's stats and my own stats, I find deeper enjoyment from our communications -- sharing ideas, insights, info, stories, preferences, feelings and more. We are a great team, not just because we have lent $200,000 together, but also because we inspire each other and help each other.
Let's keep growing in all ways.