Hi,
as most of you will know, in the January Newsletter, Kiva asked for translators (particularly Vietnamese and Mongolian)/editors to come forward and volunteer. On the "Do More"-section of kiva.org, other languages are also listed as "needed".
Because of some complaints on the messageboard of Team Europe (particularly by a Portuguese lender) that volunteers would not get any feedback, in reaction to the newsletter I sent a PM to Fiona with the request to make sure, if possible, that all applicants will get some kind of feedback.
This triggered (thanks, Fiona!) a very interesting and informative reply from Naomi Baer, Kiva's Translation Program Manager, that she has kindly permitted me to share with you:
Dear Wolfgang,
Thank you very much for reaching out to Fiona with your question about the Kiva Translation Program. I am sorry to hear that there is frustration from potential volunteers, and I'd like to provide some information about our processes.
We currently have 337 editors and translators in our volunteer program, editing or translating approximately 5000 loans each month. We have always been fortunate at Kiva to have very generous offers of volunteer support, and at the moment, we have over 500 potential volunteers who have applied on the website to help with editing or translating loans. As you can imagine, given Kiva's limited resources, we work hard to balance communication to a large pool of potential volunteers, with the large volume of loan review we do each month. We would like to be able to provide personal responses to each applicant, but at the very least, we are working towards a system where automatic messages will go out to let volunteer applicants know where they are in our process.
We value each volunteer who works with Kiva greatly, and we want to ensure that those are already working on the editing and translation teams can be fully engaged, and that we have the capacity to work with them. For this reason, we do keep our volunteer team size limited, so that each active volunteer will have the opportunity to participate fully, and to make it possible for our limited staff to coordinate the team.
This fall, the Kiva Translation and Editing Programs transitioned to a new volunteer registration system, and those who have registered since this system was launched in November should have received a response upon registration. We have been working in recent months to establish a process for ensuring that all volunteer applications get reviewed in a timely manner by an intern who has been trained to do so. Both of these processes are in place, and some automated messages are now being generated at later steps in the process as well. For example, some volunteers have recently been placed on a wait list and received messages informing them that we will be in touch when we have new needs on our teams.
In addition, we are currently developing reports which will allow us to gauge the level of recruitment needed for each language, and we plan to adjust the recruitment information on Kiva's Do More page accordingly in the near future. This should provide more accurate information about what volunteer applicants can expect.
One of the best problems an organization can have is the offer of more volunteer support than we can manage, and we recognize that this comes with the responsibility to communicate to the community about how Kiva supporters can best be involved. For the editing and translation program, we currently need additional translation volunteers who can translate from Vietnamese and Mongolian to English, and we could use help in getting the word out to recruit potential volunteers. We also need editors with professional editing or writing backgrounds to volunteer on the editing team. For other languages currently listed on the Do More page, we don't plan to add additional volunteers to these teams right away, but would welcome applications for the future. Our volunteer teams are always growing and changing, and we will undoubtedly need additional Spanish translators, as well as translators in other languages, at some point later this spring.
For Portuguese, the language you inquired about, we have a very small team, as Kiva has only one active Field Partner in Mozambique, and has not yet begun working in any other Lusophone countries. We may need to build the Portuguese volunteer team later this year, but we don't have any immediate needs.
I hope that I have answered your questions and addressed your concerns. Please don't hesitate to let me know if I can provide any additional information.
Liz Harmon suggested that you might also be interested in posting my response to Kivafriends, so that others who have experienced communication issues regarding volunteer opportunities will have some additional information. I would greatly appreciate it if you could pass the word along and post this information as appropriate.
Many thanks for your support of Kiva, and for your interest in volunteering. It's very helpful to hear from members of the Kiva community like you, and to be able to provide you with some information about our efforts to make Kiva run as smoothly as possible.
Best wishes,
Naomi
Thanks, Naomi, it is always very interesting for us (well, at least for me) to get to look "behind the scenes".
I will also attach here an attachment to Naomi's e-mail.
Best wishes,
Wolfgang.
