“The people I serve often need help from other agencies. They need mental health counseling, drug and alcohol services, education programs and other services. They can’t make employment progress without this help from other programs. But I can’t get them to go to other programs for help. How can I get them to follow up on referrals with other agencies?
Workforce development programs can’t meet all the needs of the people we serve. Referral is a critical part of helping people make progress in their lives. We can often see the need for someone to access the services of another program but getting them to go often seems impossible. I call the distance between the needs of an individual and accessing other services the referral gap. If we can’t overcome the referral gap people won’t be successful with employment and other things in their lives. Closing the referral gap is often the key to helping people make the progress they need in order to overcome the challenges they face. Why is it so hard to get people to close the referral gap?
If you want to close the referral gap the first thing you need to think about is to reframe how you and the customer think about referral. You need to help your customer make the connection between things they really want that will improve their life and getting help with a problem from another agency. We tend to tell people about the resource and try and get them to go in the same conversation. Unless the referral issue is life threatening, we should break this process down into two stages.
The first stage is to help people get deeply in touch with the need for referral. If our job seekers don’t feel a compelling need to get help, nothing we say will make a difference. You need to connect improving the quality of life of the job seeker and getting help from another agency. Help your customer envision the difference in their life if they don’t get help or if they do get help. How will getting help or not getting help have an impact on something that means a lot to your customer?
I remember working with an elderly man who was illiterate. He had worked for many years in a warehouse and found ways to get around not being able to read or write. Now he was laid off and he needed to learn literacy skills in order to get another job. He was very resistant to the idea. His daughter had just had a child that was the most important thing in his life. My strategy was to help him think about what his literacy problem would mean to his granddaughter. I carefully had those conversations with him.
Over time he began to realize that the quality of his granddaughters life would be directly and negatively impacted by his illiteracy. He would not be able to teach her to read. He would not be able to read stories to her. He would not be able to read the things she wrote in school. As his thinking evolved he worried about whether she would be embarrassed to have an illiterate grandfather.
He got to the point where he felt the compelling need to get help with his literacy issue, and he asked me where he could go for help. It wasn’t easy for him, but he wanted his granddaughter to have a grandfather that could read so he stuck with the program. Being in a literacy program impressed an employer he met through a neighbor and that led to a job.
I call this strategy of finding ways to build a compelling need for referral in the job seeker, “boiling the need.” The need for referral has to boil up in the people we serve so that the need for referral comes primarily from them and not from us. Don’t think of referral in terms of how do I get this person to go? Think of referral as something that will help the job seeker get something that they desperately want. This is something that the job seeker loves and highly values. I want to emphasize that this strategy is for referral needs that are not immediate life and death situations, but quality of life situations.
One of the best things you can do to learn how to close the referral gap is to get training from the referral resource to find out what to say and not to say that will help to close the referral gap. In life and death situations you need to give people information about the referral agency and say what you need to say that will work as a trigger to jump start the motivation to get help.
Don’t try to figure this out yourself. Get training from the referral resource. They can be experts that will help you identify the most powerful triggers that will unleash motivation in a life and death referral situation. If possible, set up a meeting with you, your job seeker and someone from the referral agency so that expert can help boil the need, so the person feels compelled to get help.
Another strategy that can be helpful in closing the referral gap is to have your job seeker talk with a program participant from your organization that has used the referral resource. You need to have signed releases of information, so you have permission from both people to be able to talk about them and their experiences. Nothing beats talking with someone that has been through the services of the other agency to help people boil the need and reduce their anxiety and resistance about going to another program. The person with experience at the other agency can answer questions, deal with people’s fears and help overcome denial and minimization, which often block people from taking action and getting the help they need.
One other element that will help with referral is to make sure you have the accurate information about the other agency. Who is and is not eligible for their services? What kind of documentation do people need? What are their hours? Do they offer services in various languages? How disability accessible are they? Is there a waiting list and how long is the wait? You want to make sure you do not refer people to the wrong place. This not only results in them not getting the services they need, but people will often lose trust in the ability of organizations to refer them. Do not make referrals to nowhere!
You will close the referral gap faster if you can develop a referral contact relationship with a staff person at the other agency. This would be the specific person that would have the skills, attitudes, experience and cultural competency to work with your program participants. People will often resist going to a place for help. They are much more likely to go if you refer them to a person and not just a place.
Make sure that strategies for closing the referral gap are part of the onboarding and training of new staff at your agency. Ask the staff member that is the most successful at getting people to go to other agencies to do an in-service for the rest of the staff. You will be amazed at how much better the outcomes will be for your customers if you can close the referral gap more often and in less time.
Remember this work usually can’t be done by one agency alone. It takes a village to serve our program participants. Organize your referral partners and help to build that village and you can be a barrier buster!
