Goal

Towards the end of my Kiva Fellowship at ACCION Texas-Louisiana, I noticed an opportunity for ACCION to take fuller advantage of their Kiva partnership.

In order to get Kiva funding for a loan, the borrower had to agree to have their loan posted on Kiva. But I noticed that potential borrowers did not understand the Kiva program or what benefit they got out of it. So ACCION lost potential Kiva funding, and borrowers lost free publicity. While visiting several ACCION offices, I noticed that ACCION kept brochures to hand out to potential borrowers. Based on the two observations, I set out to make a brochure about Kiva funding for ACCION staff to hand out.

Role

This was an entirely solo, self-initiated project. Before begining, I first verified that I had time to take on a side project without affecting my primary Fellowship responsibilities.

Results

See my final Kiva Brochure [pdf]. Or see the screenshots (below). Once complete, I delivered the original editable files to ACCION and to Kiva's Fellowship program as well, for dissemination to other Kiva partners.

Process

Client-editable content

One of my goal was that Kiva partners, like ACCION, could adapt and edit the brochure easily themselves. Partly so other Kiva partners could adapt the brochure for themselves, and partly so ACCION could translate the brochure to Spanish and reach a wider audience. So I asked ACCION staff for recommendations of tools to use, to see what they would be comfortable using. Based on the results, I learned Publisher for the project.

Finding a client-editable way of creating the graphic representation of Kiva's process, however, was a challenge. No program could create an expressive, high-quality graphic without requiring too much effort or skill to be acceptable; including Word, Publisher and other commonly-available programs. Dropping the graphic was not an option. Besides making the brochure more appealing, this graphic was key to clarify the complex Kiva process; especially for visual lerners or those with limited English skills.

I chose to create a cleaner .svg graphic in Inkscape and exported a few versions. Including one version with no text so organizations could add their own. This limited what could be easily edited in exchange for creating a more compelling graphic.

Client feedback

I gathered feedback from staff at a few steps in the process; after creating text content, sketches of the graphic, and finally the overall draft brochure, in physical form.