You asked, we listened: make referrals on One Degree

Since One Degree first started, we have had the pleasure of working with and getting to know hundreds of nonprofit professionals — social workers, case managers, nurses, and others — who are on the ground every day working with low-income and at-risk families. Their insight has been embedded into everything we do, which has resulted in some of our members’ favorite new features.

Now we’re introducing One Degree Referrals, a tool for nonprofit professionals to make it simple to recommend and keep track of resources for their clients.

Free and easy-to-use, our referral tools enable nonprofit professionals using One Degree to create progress plans for their clients. We built it in collaboration with our nonprofit professional partners, and it has already proven to facilitate the work of our early-adopting members.

The Problem: Referring families to services and tracking their progress is beyond grueling

Nonprofit professionals frequently tell us how difficult and time-consuming it is to track the progress of the families they work with. The process of putting together a plan, keeping track of each client’s progress and then assessing any next steps involved a lot of time, phone calls and lists that quickly became outdated and useless. Our web platform has already been helping our pro members discover thousands of resources specific to their clients’ needs and location, but after that, turning those opportunities into specific action plans and keeping track of their clients’ progress was up to them.

Since over 1,350 nonprofit professionals are already using One Degree, we want to help them go one step further by staying on top of their clients’ progress and, ultimately, help more families faster.

Our Solution: An easy-to-use referral system built right into One Degree
One Degree Referrals allow nonprofit professionals to keep a list of their clients, create individual action plans for them, share these plans with each client through email, text message, or with a paper print-out, and track their progress as they advance through it. The process is easy and keeps all information in one place. And like everything on One Degree, client information is stored in our HIPAA-compliant database.

1. Build a Plan: Based on your client’s needs, search One Degree and quickly add the opportunities you recommend to a referral.
2. Share it: Once you’ve finished adding opportunities to the referral, share it with your client via email, text message, or just print it out for them! When you’re creating a referral for your client, you can also choose to notify the agency they’re referring them to. This way, the agency will know to expect your client soon.
3. Track it: Now that you’ve made a referral, you and your client will see the resources you recommended in their plan. At any time you can update the status of whether or not your client used the resource. If you have a tech savvy client, they can log into their account on a computer or smart phone and update the status themselves and you’ll be notified of their progress.

We hope One Degree Referrals will make it easier than ever to get your clients to the critical resources they need and stay organized.

To learn more, join our webinar on January 25th or simply start using One Degree Referrals by logging into your pro member account and clicking on “My Clients” in the left side of any page.

Finally, we want to take a moment to thank all our nonprofit pro members and partners who gave us insights, ideas, and feedback to make One Degree Referrals a reality. Please let us know what you think, and keep your ideas coming! Email: help@1degree.org — we’d love your feedback.