Simple and secure collaboration
Kiva lets ordinary people make a difference by lending money to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Volunteer Kiva Fellows around the world work with local entrepreneurs and finance institutions. These volunteers realized they needed a way to easily share information with each other and the home office.
PBwiki has been incredibly helpful at reducing our workload.
— Anushka Ratnayake, Kiva Fellows Program Manager
At first, Kiva tried using email, but the sheer volume of messages (200-300 per day) began to overwhelm the team, and extensive use of document attachments caused a host of issues, especially for field workers dialing in over slow connections.
That's when CTO Sam Makiewicz suggested to Kiva Fellows Program Manager Anushka Ratnayake that PBwiki could provide a highly effective knowledge sharing and collaboration solution that would solve these problems. Anushka needed a solution that was:
PBwiki is able to meet all these needs and helped dramatically increase the productivity of the Kiva Fellows program.
Anushka began by creating several pages of instructions and uploading some of the most widely-used documents. She wasn't sure if the Fellows would understand what to do with the wiki, but her fears were quickly dispelled. Within a week, numerous Fellows were contributing, including a team in Guatemala who posted complete Spanish translations of Anushka's original documents!
Today, the Fellows program uses its wiki for everything from sharing confidential financial information to training all incoming Fellows. In fact, Kiva's wiki has a 100% participation rate – every Fellow uses the wiki – and the ability to use PBwiki is now a requirement for anyone who wants to join the program. More importantly, using PBwiki has made Anushka's life much easier. Use of the wiki has cut email volume by 30%, and virtually eliminated troublesome document attachments. What's more, with a flexible, dynamic knowledgebase available, the volume of questions that the home office receives from Fellows in the field has plummeted.
In addition to meeting Kiva's immediate needs, PBwiki will help the organization continue to grow. As the Fellows program expands, the value of wiki knowledge sharing and collaboration will only increase. "Before using PBwiki, I didn't think I would ever need to create or use a wiki," said Anushka, "It's been a huge success."