How to create a successful and sustainable Lending Team

In your Kiva invites
Make use of Kiva Invites to share your Kiva community with family and friends! This feature is found in My Portfolio and even includes a sample message. Be sure to add the web address of your Lending Team to the bottom.

In your email signature
Sign off with a message you care about every time you send an email. Copy and paste your Lending Team URL (which can be found on your Lending Team page) into your email signature. (Remember, you can always insert the URL of the general Lending Teams Page to encourage your friends to explore Kiva communities: http://www.kiva.org/teams)

In your social networks
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn! There are tons of great social media tools that you can use to grow your Lending Team. Post its web address on your profile page, as a comment to your friend, as an update, and wherever else you think to include it!

Welcome new members
New team members, especially those new to Kiva, greatly appreciate being welcomed into the group. If your team is small enough, it can be a nice touch to send a personal message welcoming new members. If you have a larger team, it might make more sense to post a message on the board once a week or once a month welcoming all new members and encouraging them to ask questions, share loans, and participate in discussions.

Discussions
What might interest your team? Is there a particular type of loan that they'd love to see? Or a region they want to hear about? You might consider sharing news or articles and start a conversation around that. The Kiva blog is a fantastic resource for this type of information, with news about what we're up to and stories from Kiva Fellows all around the world.

Monthly lending themes
It can often be difficult for new lenders to narrow down which borrowers to loan to. Monthly themes are an easy and fun way to help team members collaborate and focus on certain types of loans. Consider starting things off yourself or having team members vote on a theme. You might pick something like "clean energy" one month, and maybe something a little more random the next month, like "borrowers wearing hats." Have fun with it!

Team milestones
As your team grows, it's important to celebrate the big milestones you cross! Whether it be the number of members in your team, the total loans, the amount of loans, or whatever else you decide on. We'd love to celebrate with you too, so give us a heads up at community@kiva.org when you're making that final push!

Between Lending Teams
Are you a region-based team? A university-affiliated team? Search for similarly organized teams in the Teams tab -- just click on a category. Ask your Lending Team captain to approach potential challenge participants using the Kiva Team Captains Lending Team. Need some help with challenge goals that can really strengthen your Lending Team? Why not see which team...

• can be the fastest growing of the month?
• can add the most members by a specific date?
• can double the current amount of members by next year?

Be sure to encourage your team members with frequent progress updates and positive reinforcement.

Between members within the same team
Invite your team members to help set a goal, such as "Who within your team can recruit the most members that month". Then see who can be the first to surpass it! You might also want to encourage this sort of activity around the 17th of the month, when all lenders receive their monthly reimbursements.

Be sure to remember that challenges don't always need to take the form of competitions- You can set a collective team goal or one for yourself that may look more like these examples:

• Collective goal: "Every entrepreneur in our team will loan $25 dollars to a particular entrepreneur this week."
• Individual goal: "For every 10 loans this team makes, I will make one $25 loan, until I reach $200 worth of loans."

Regardless of what you choose to do, make your terms and limits clear so that you have a challenging, yet attainable goal.