[nowarninglabel]

That's something I've pressed for here a lot at Kiva, showing how positive your impact is. Last year, we started rating our partners on "catalytic"-ness, which is somewhat of a proxy for impact, and now 33% of our loans are rated highly catalytic. There's some studies which have shown impact both of microfinance in general and some that include our specific partners, but in general not nearly enough studies. And I'm sure with enough data, we'd find that microloans can have one of the greatest impacts, but that there are certainly situations where charitable giving can be even more impactful under the right circumstances. The problem is studies are hard to do right and expensive, and thus it's hard to get data on what is most impactful. From an engineering perspective, I'd love to solve this problem, but it seems to be one of those problems that requires more of an academic solution.

[daeken]

All I have to say is: thank you. Thank you to every single person involved with Kiva in any way. Every month I have an auto-deposit into my Kiva account, and I'm always excited to jump in and distribute the funds.

The team I'm in (http://www.kiva.org/team/nerdfighters) is open to anyone and has themes where each month we fund women, people from specific nations, etc and work together to make sure that the recipients' loans are filled. It's both fun and helps decrease world suck.

Keep up the good work -- to you and the rest of the team at Kiva. You rock.

[nowarninglabel]

Nerdfighters are awesome, thanks for being a part! I actually built that auto-deposit feature during a 3 day all-nighter a while back, I couldn't believe we hadn't built it yet so I did it during one of our innovation iterations :)