What Should a Church Ask Before Making a Referral?
Six things. What specifically they need, whether it is an emergency, whether they can physically get there, when they are actually available, whether they will qualify, and whether they have already tried this agency. The need is the easy one. The other five are what decide whether the referral works.
A referral fails for one of two reasons. Either the provider was wrong, or the person could not get to the right provider. The second is more common and it is the one that never gets recorded.
These six questions catch most of both.
1. What specifically do they need?
“Help with bills” is four different providers. Rent, power, water and a phone bill go to different places, and in most counties they go to places that do not talk to each other.
Get to the specific thing. Not because the paperwork needs it, but because a general answer produces a general referral, and a general referral is a phone number the person will not call.
2. Is this an emergency?
Ask early, because the answer changes everything that follows.
A church benevolence process is for non-emergency community services. If someone is in immediate danger, that is 911. If someone describes suicide or self-harm, that is 988. In CMinLink, detection runs before the referral logic, so a crisis message gets the hotline rather than a list of food pantries — but a person asking the question out loud is still the better safeguard.
3. Can they get there?
This is the question that gets skipped most and costs the most.
A provider twelve minutes away by car can be fifty minutes away by bus, and a fifty-minute trip against a two-hour window is not a referral, it is an errand you have asked someone to fail at.
Ask how they will travel. Then check the distance the same way — CMinLink measures real travel time from your church’s address and can compare walking, driving, transit and bicycling, because the answer genuinely differs.
4. When are they actually free?
Someone who works weekdays cannot use a pantry that opens Tuesday mornings, no matter how close it is.
Combine this with the provider’s real hours rather than its posted ones. Knowing a place is open right now, and when it next opens, turns this from a scheduling puzzle into one sentence.
5. Will they qualify?
Eligibility is stored per provider, as the provider’s own wording. Read it before referring rather than after.
County limits, household composition, income thresholds, and “not served in the last twelve months” are all common and all invisible until someone is standing at a counter.
A volunteer’s job here is to check, not to judge. The provider decides.
6. Have they already tried this one?
If your church has helped this person before, that history is already on their record, and it usually contains the most useful sentence in the whole conversation: which agency already said no, and why.
Without a record, you find this out by sending them back to the place that turned them down last month.
What to do with the answers
Write them down when you make the referral, not later. In CMinLink that is the need, the provider, the category, how the referral was delivered, and who logged it.
That record is what makes question 6 answerable next time — for you, and for whichever volunteer is covering the desk when this person comes back.
Related
Common questions
- Is this an intake form?
- No. It is a conversation. The point of writing the answers down afterward is that the next person at your church starts from them instead of asking again.
- What if someone will not answer these?
- Refer anyway. A referral can be logged anonymously with no identity attached, and it still counts in your totals.
- Should a volunteer screen for eligibility?
- They should check it, not judge it. Eligibility requirements are stored per provider so a volunteer can read them out rather than guess.