We kicked off the New Year with our loan total at $1,360,950 at 12:10am pacific time (the Kiva time zone). I took a screenshot of our team page using my iPhone.
By the time I woke up the morning of Jan 1 the Loan-a-Thon had kicked into high gear thanks to the flood of loans posted by Kiva on the first (Kiva usually has a flood of new loans on the first of every month because they put a specific cap on each MFI which limits how much they can raise in capital through Kiva in any given month).
By the end of new years day (Jan 1) our loan total was 1,379,400 a one day increase of $18,450.
View the screenshot:
Then we hit the Loan-a-Thon overtime of Jan 2 where we raised another $10,475 to bring our loan total to 1,389,875.
View the screenshot:
This was a wildly successful Loan-a-thon, perhaps our most successful ever. We raised $29,700 in loans, 958 loans, added 69 new members and on Jan 1 we had 52 posts on the team message board; which I believe is a one day record. Getting the word out early and cross posting to our facebook group as well as the natural return of team members to Kiva through the holidays helped make this a great Loan-a-thon. We had many pledges from our teammates which helped to encourage each other to find a little more "entertainment" money from our budgets to fatten our Kiva portfolios. After seeing what my teammates had pledged, I increased my pledge from
$100 to $200 in new money.
I've bounced around the idea of setting our 2010 year end goal as loaning $3,000,000 on the team message board. Based on the feedback I am going to officially set our 2010 year end goal to raise a total of $3 million dollars in loans including what we have loaned to date.
Happy New Year,
Pete
