Referral Management

One of the mandates of your nonprofit or microlending organization is to provide a comprehensive system of information and referrals to your clients. To do that, you must first be aware of all agencies and resources available in the community, then find out what services are offered and what their limitations are. Referrals are an effective way to combine and leverage resources in your community.

In order to make and receive optimal referrals, it is vital to evaluate a referral service to ensure that it can serve your clients competently, but it is equally important that you make your own services known to other agencies and organizations that can refer clients to you.

Tracking Referrals

Once a referral network has been established, referrals must be tracked and monitored to maintain adequate documentation and to evaluate both the effectiveness of the assistance provided and the ongoing needs of the clients. Each referral should be recorded so that your organization can track the frequency of referral from each source and ensure timely follow up. The tracking is especially important in identifying the value generated or received from referrals. As well, it can show if preferred referrals are occurring between partners and in what proportions.

In TEA 10, you can manage both incoming and outgoing referrals by:

• Populating the referral data (Date, Source, Person being referred, Direction of referral, i.e., incoming or outgoing, and Channel) into the database;
  
  
• Updating the data as it changes;
  
  
• Retrieving the data quickly and accurately; and
  
  
• Tracking the referral results.

Referral Services

Another important piece of information to track about referrals is the list of services offered and received. The services list within a referral record is a high-level or marketing list of services that your organization and your partner organizations provide to clients. This list is not a detailed or comprehensive list of the actual activities and services used for tracking purposes, but rather a high level generalization of these services.

During the process of creating a client referral record in TEA 10, you can select the referral services tab and select all the services of interest to the client.

TEA 10 makes referral tracking and management easy, and it will also allow you to quantify the effectiveness of your referral programs and report on those results to your funders and partners.