Thanks to everyone who joined us for today’s Engaged Brand Twebinar with Lisa and Chelsa from Kiva.org!

Kiva.org is a website that lets people lend money to entrepreneurs around the world who need loans. Individual loans can be as small as $25 and will be combined with other micro-loans to make up the total loan for the entrepreneur. Kiva is raising about $1 million in loans every 9 days.

If you missed out on today’s twebinar where they shared some of their social media strategies, be sure to download the Kiva podcast now.

Since Kiva is a non-profit organization they have a limited marketing budget. One of the ways they are able to make that budget stretch as far as possible is to engage with their community. Recently they were involved in the Chase Community Giving contest where they won $25,000 to help them continue on with their cause.

In order to win the contest they needed to get votes. And the way they got votes was by asking their community for help through social media.

Some of their social media strategies for the contest:

• Used their newsletter to ask for votes;
• Added small ads about the contest to their website;
• Lenders received a message to please vote within their Thank You for Your Loan letter;
• Posted contest info on their blog;
• Encouraged staff members to spread the word through their own personal online communities;
• Twitter – in addition to tweeting about the contest, they also sent personal DMs to some of their followers who had large followings (influencers) and asked them to spread the word;
• FaceBook – they created an event on FaceBook, plus they reached out to their sub-groups to share the information on how to vote;
• LinkedIn – sent out an announcement to all of their followers;
• Recruited other bloggers to share the word on the contest;
• Posted to their community, KivaFriends.org;
• And they approached their top 50 lending teams on Kiva.org.

Their biggest learnings while using social media are to sit back and listen to your community and engage with them in their conversations. Plus, don’t be afraid to experiment. Just put yourself out there and start out small in one area until you get a feel for it.

If you want to keep up with Kiva and see what they are doing next, be sure to follow them on Twitter @Kiva

Thanks again for listening and asking some great questions. To hear the answers to the questions below, be sure to listen to the podcast.