Blocking a loan so the whole team can participate...reverse of a group loan

[Guest]

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[rebecca]

Hi, here's a thought.  I just made my 5000th loan and am on the Leed's United Team.  I wanted to get my teammates onto the same loan as me, so i posted an email.  But, it got me to thinking, wouldn't fun if a whole team backed one loan.  Like, say the team captain could "freeze" a loan for it's team.  That team would have, say, 2 days to fund it.  If it could not succeed, it would go back into the general fundraising. 

I just think it could be very motivating.  A team could get behind one sort of product/country, etc, and they could all pull together to try to get a loan funded, and they wouldn't want it to go back into the general pool. 

Becky

[JohnAtKiva]

Very cool idea!  And WOW, 5,000 loans?!!!!!  Amazing!

But what if a loan ended up not getting funded, because a team blocked it and wasn't able to deliver?  Would love to hear your thoughts!

John

[rebecca]

Well, my thought was a team member (or maybe just leader) could block it for a limited time.  Say a loan has 10 days left.  The team leader could grab and hold that loan for a limited time, say 2 days.  The team leader could send an email, and talk it up w/ his team, and count it down...
We have 2 days to fund this loan for.....we only have one day left...only 1 more hour to fund the last $75, etc.  If the team can't get there it  goes back to the general loan pool and anyone can fund it. 

This way there would be urgency to fund a loan, the there would be a direct connection for the whole team to the whole loan.  In some ways, I think it would be great to make it only for group loans.  So, a whole group connects to another whole group. If you are the team member who grabs the loan, and make the first loan, your team could exclusively fund that group.  Your team could track groups of loans together and I think it could make a better connection.

?not sure?
Becky

[Diane R]

But what if a loan ended up not getting funded, because a team blocked it and wasn't able to deliver?

That team would have, say, 2 days to fund it.  If it could not succeed, it would go back into the general fundraising. 

John, I think that's the answer.

There have been tons of times when virtual teams (before there were real teams) wanted to hold a loan to share with friends (think "team members").  Significant personal loan milestones and Kiva loan #150000 are examples (see this thread for all sorts of milestone loans). Around here, in an earlier day when things were simpler, someone would just "basket" a large portion of the loan and hang out in the KF chatroom (which actually did used to work, I swear) and as people would pop into chat, the holder would release a $25 "slice" of that loan, which the person wanting to join would pick up by camping out on the loan page and refreshing like crazy until a $25 chunk popped up.  (Once teams existed, A Tisket A Tasket was created for the same reason, consisting of people who liked sharing significant loans with their friends.) There was a lot of outcry about this practice, both because people sometimes used it to try to block the funding of a loan completely (such as the infamous bear gall loan or with various cockfighting loans), and because sometimes people missed out on a loan they hoped to join and felt hurt about missing when, in their opinion, people had been "hoarding" a loan rather than just taking their own piece and leaving the rest (which led to sometimes pointed discussions here about whether this practice was "basket-hoarding" or "basket-sharing", and whether it was similarly inappropriate to fund an entire small loan onesself... and I am not looking forward to a resurrection of those discussions).

It would be interesting to envision ways a team might be enabled to reserve a loan for some defined period of time.  The rules, restrictions, and process might be more trouble than it's worth, though.

--Diane.

[rebecca]

I'm thinking it depends
Does kiva have more trouble finding people to fund loans?
Or more trouble finding appropriate people to lend to?

If it's the first maybe worthwhile
If it's the later what's the point
Do you know?

[rebecca]

Or...maybe there is a way to have teams lend to groups
Without getting into the frustrations of holding loans etc
But make a direct connection between a team and a group of borrowers group to group similar to the connection kiva makes to individual to individual

I did not want to join a team... I got so many invites...I joined Leeds united only because the leader said he was going to approach them for sponsorship
And I have been amazed how motivated being on a team ( ok I know Leeds u plays soccerll but that's all I know) makes me..I did not expect it to impact me at all.  I just thought why not I might help get more people to support

I want our team to be on the top of Sports every month!  We compete with those cheese heads for change

So I think if we could have our own set of group loans we could connect w each other more
And feel more connection with our groups

[rebecca]

Dianne, I also think it's interesting to hear the lengths people went to just to be on the same loans as friends
Doesn't that mean this might be a good idea just on it's surface?

[JohnAtKiva]

Dianne, I also think it's interesting to hear the lengths people went to just to be on the same loans as friends
Doesn't that mean this might be a good idea just on it's surface?

I totally agree that people want to share loans with their friends!  We've seen that request come up again and again here on KivaFriends.

Here's a random idea (this comes from me as an individual, and is not meant to represent any sort of organizational view). :-)

What if you could "reserve" a piece of a loan.  To do so, you'd have to commit to funding that piece of the loan.  So say for example, I wanted to reserve the last $200 of this loan to share with seven of my friends:
http://www.kiva.org/lend/300113

I could (somehow) reserve $200 of the loan to be shared... and then I asked seven of my friends to help cover the $175 that I wasn't covering myself.  If only 5 of my friends stepped up with $125... I'd be there as a guarantor to cover the last $75 remaining.

So in a sense, the "reserving" lender guarantees that s/he will find people to cover all of the loan shares that s/he "reserved".  If we did it that way, I'm pretty sure that there wouldn't be any issues where borrowers weren't getting funded due to basket-sharing/hoarding issues.

What do you guys think?

John

[JohnR]

So in a sense, the "reserving" lender guarantees that s/he will find people to cover all of the loan shares that s/he "reserved".

The only way to guarantee the reserving lender covers the whole loan is if he has enough credits to cover the entire loan.  Mechanically, it might work by having the RL purchase the entire loan, so it's checked out and fully funded, and then transfer $25 increments to willing team mates during the allotted time.  So for two days (or whatever the time frame that's been selected) the team mates are in essence transferring their credits to the RL, not to the MFI.  The RL becomes a sort of loan broker, but only by purchasing the entire loan to begin with.  The RL would designate how much he wants to contribute to the loan ($25, $50, etc.) and the team mates can take bits until they get down to that level, that way the RL can remain on the loan.  (This ought to keep the Kiva IT folks busy for a while!)

That would be difficult for all but the smallest loans, though, unless you've got quite a few credits available.

Another possibility would be to have a mechanism by which team mates could transfer credits into a team "bank" and once the bank's funds were adequate those credits were used to fully fund a loan.  You'd have to make it so that there was either a time frame in which the credits would automatically revert back to the team member's account if they hadn't been used for funding a loan, or the team member could transfer them back at any time.   The team captain (?) could be given authority to use the credits in the bank.  The loans would still count against the individual, just like when attributing to a team now, so that repaid monies are credited to the team members' accounts, not to the "bank."

John R

[rebecca]

I like the proposal a lot
Teams could pool money into one bucket
When a loan comes up that is appropriate
( the team could set up criteria in advance if wanted)
The team leader could chose it

Then the team could have a whole set of loans
It is not that much different than the current process
In a way tou are just giving tour team leader the power to kend your money
But the outcome is teams can lead as a whole

I think it would be positive step

It wasn't really what I pictured because you might lose that additional motivation to keep the loan on your team and thus create more funding
But it solves a lot of the issues and seems relatively simple

It would work especially well when a team has a "cause" I would think...like a catholic or a woman's group or a group advocating for the handicapped because they could find loans in line with their goals and I imagine the team would be delighted to share these goals