ATLASSIAN + KIVA

Any tools that are intuitive and help people
connect are invaluable. We’re a global workforce,and Atlassian helps us stay in sync while doing async
work. It’s been a big win for us.
BRIT HEIRING
Director of Communications

Microloans, macro impact:
How Kiva collaborates to fundambitions with Atlassian
See how Kiva, a global microlending non-profit, uses
Atlassian to manage complex work, collaborate, and stayaligned on their mission to fund ambitions.

I ND USTRY
Non-profit; Financial Services

ATL ASS I A N P RO D U C T S & A P P S

LOCATIO N
San Francisco, CA
NUMBER O F US ERS
145

Jira Software
Project and issue tracker

Jira Service Management
High-velocity ITSM

Confluence
Document collaboration

Statuspage
Incident communication

Ambition is more than a feeling – it’s a force. Each of us has unique goals anddreams of our own, but working together enables us to achieve greater things
than we could alone. It’s this belief that brought Kiva and Atlassian together
to unleash the power of Kiva’s teams, so they can do the same for aspiring
individuals around the world.
Kiva was founded in 2005, with a mission to expand financial access andhelp underserved communities thrive through crowdfunded loans supported
by individuals around the world. This capital enables mothers like Salao inCambodia to start a coffee cart and feed her family, students like Meerim in
Kyrgyzstan to get an education, and people like Pamela in Nairobi to channel
their own struggles into support for others in need.
It’s easy to understand how microloans change lives, but managing theborrowing and lending process is far from simple. With over four millionborrowers and over two million lenders in 77 countries and counting, Kiva’sorganization has grown increasingly complex. They need the right people,
processes, and platforms to drive their non-profit’s success. With Atlassianas their go-to work management system, Kiva has increased collaboration,
visibility, speed, and employee engagement – all adding up to an even larger
force for good around the globe.

Sparking collaboration with a cross-functional platform
In 2005, Kiva launched by making a few microloans to women in Uganda,
supported by lenders from the San Francisco area. Now, they’re helping fund a
new microloan somewhere around the world every two minutes.
Many startups experience growing pains when they rapidly scale like this. ForKiva, the process has been even more complicated due to the nature of theirwork: a hybrid financial services non-profit with roots in the tech business. As
the organization expanded their team and their reach, they needed a betterway to onboard new employees and volunteers, gain visibility across silos, worksmarter, and deliver faster. Since Kiva implemented Atlassian in 2007, Headof Engineering Matthew Flaming says employees across the entire business(referred to as “Kivans”) have adopted the tools as “the backbone” of their work.
“Both Jira and Confluence are among the core tools that we use to coordinate
work, keep track of ideas, and understand the status of projects,” Matthew says.
Kiva’s team of engineers and their stakeholders use Jira Software for the full
spectrum of agile product development and management: turning user feedback
into epics, stories, and tasks; collecting feature requests and bug fixes; andmanaging backlogs of future projects. They also connect Jira Software tickets
with Confluence pages to elaborate on stories and tasks. With these tools,
teams can work iteratively and independently while staying in sync. “Jira is how
we get visibility around what the whole organization is doing, and then on a

Atlassian has been agame changer because it
allows us to focus our timeand effort on furthering
our mission rather thansearching for information.
DEEPIKA HEARN
Senior Marketing Manager ofAcquisitions

macro level, how we manage workflows and movework between teams,” Matthew says.
Beyond Engineering, Kivans throughout theorganization also use Confluence to document
and store information in a centralized place.
“Confluence is very much our single source of
truth, with documentation for all of our workflows
internally and externally with borrowers and lending
partners. It’s our institutional memory where people
find answers to their questions and get ghosts ofwisdom from people in the past,” Matthew explains.

Atlassian serves as anatural center of gravity that
attracts teams together.

Kiva even invites new hires to make edits andadditions to pages as they go through onboarding
to augment the organization’s living library, while
reinforcing to new Kivans that their voice matters.

MAT THEW FLAMING

Deepika Hearn, Senior Marketing Manager ofHead of Engineering

Acquisition, adds that Confluence has been a“game changer” for teams throughout Kiva.

For example, her Marketing colleagues rely heavily on the tool to collaborate
with each other, document processes, and track performance across marketing
campaigns. “Confluence gives us an opportunity to travel back in time andunderstand the nuances of each past campaign – the challenges, goals, process,and results – so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time,” Deepika says.
When cross-functional groups work together, such as Deepika’s co-workers inMarketing and Matthew’s in Engineering, Matthew says that “Atlassian serves
as a natural center of gravity that attracts teams together.” Kivans collaborateusing Confluence to document and share information, Jira Service Management
to request service from each other, Jira Software to move projects forward, andStatuspage for system status and incident communication. “We give our teams
quite a lot of autonomy. Atlassian is the ‘lingua franca’ and cross-functional
workflow between teams,” Matthew explains. “It’s the way they connect togather each other’s work, give each other insight into what they’re doing, andoften if there’s a task that spans teams, that will either be done by linking tickets
or by passing a ticket between teams.”
Kiva has integrated their Atlassian platform with othergo-to tools to streamline workflows and communication.
For instance, IT integrated Jira Service Management with
Slack so employees can submit and manage support tickets
through chat. Engineers have also connected Jira Softwarewith Jenkins, Github, and Miro to power their development
work, and employees across Kiva can embed Google Sheets
in Confluence for easy spreadsheet searching.

Without tools like Atlassian, we would be abunch of ambitious people who want to make an
impact, scattered in different directions. Atlassian
allows us to create a shared understanding where
it wouldn’t be possible and work as one team with
one set of goals and one shared reality.
MAT THEW FLAMING
Head of Engineering

Spending less time searching and switching between tools means more time formeaningful work. Deepika says, “Atlassian…allows us to focus our time and effort
on furthering our mission rather than searching for information.”

One platform, one shared reality
While teams across Kiva use Atlassian products in different ways, Director ofCommunications Brit Heiring says having centralized, integrated tools has
improved communication and engagement across the board. “Any tools that areintuitive and help people connect are invaluable. We’re a global workforce, andAtlassian helps us stay in sync while doing async work. It’s been a big win for us,”she says. “For example, by compiling information for events and announcements
via Confluence, plus a variety of other tools, internal communication has
increased across the organization. Initiatives like these are showing early signsof success, such as employee engagement increasing from 74% to 78% in thelast eight months.”
The more engaged employees are, the more of a difference they’ll maketogether. “Without tools like Atlassian, we would be a bunch of ambitious

people who want to make an impact, scattered in different directions,”
Matthew says. “Atlassian allows us to create a shared understanding where it
wouldn’t otherwise be possible, and work together with one set of goals andone shared reality.”
As Matthew points out, Kivans (and the borrowers they serve) have never beenshort on ambition – but ambition isn’t the only ingredient of success. With theright work management tools to complement their passionate people and agile
processes, Kiva’s team is collaborating more than ever to make an even bigger
impact worldwide.

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