referral management

Hey ​@jejohnson!

Airtable can def get that done. Would you mind providing some further detail?

What exactly is the use case?

Is this a school?

What are form submissions actually “referring”?

What do responses to the referrals look like/include and who responde to them?

What exactly is included in student files?

I’ve helped multiple schools set up their bases, so I’m sure I’ll be able to help you out. Feel free to schedule a call using this link and we can go through it together. 
 

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Hello,

Thank you for your reply. This is for a school. The submissions would be from teachers re: student behavior and requests to either investigate or request administrative support. The responding administrator would need to apply various actions and then submit and share the response with involved parties via email.  Student files at a minimum would need to include, name, student ID, grade, teacher and other identifiers.  If Airtable has the capability, I would love to have different views where we could capture academic and attendance data as well. Right now everything is in multiple systems and they don’t talk to each other nicely.  But again, I don’t know how to do this.  We currently have our referrals working through Cognito. 
 

Thank you in advance for any help, guidance you can provide.  

Hey ​@jejohnson,

Would you like to go through this on a call? I think that will make it easier!

Maybe, after our call we can get back to this post and outline a high-level summary of our discussion for future readers to get the full picture as well.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Hmm, it’s probably doable within Airtable, but it’s really hard to confirm; mostly what makes or breaks using Airtable is the nitty gritty stuff like how you’re controlling access to the data, pricing, email formatting and stuff like that

As a starting off point, I’d suggest just trying to create a working system in Airtable and see how it feels and I’ve set something up here for you to check out

The idea is that you’ll have the following tables:

• Students

  • 

     

• Teachers

  • 

• Referrals
  • Where each record represents a single referral and is linked to the Student in question and the Teacher who’s creating the referral

  • 

• Email Log

  • This is optional but I like having this, it’ll let you keep track of the information that’s sent out, when, and to who for each referral.  Beats trying to look through your email

  • 

• Actions
  • I didn’t really flesh this one out as it really depends on your workflow.  But the idea is that this table would contain the administrative actions for each referral

The nice thing about Airtable is it’ll let you create little automations to help smooth things over, and so that email you want to send out for each referral can be activated by the ‘Send referral email’ checkbox like so:

• 

• And this is how the automation would look

• 

   

And the idea is once you click the checkbox, it’ll send out the email and then create a record in Email Log for you automatically

Airtable lets you pull in whatever details you want as long as it exists in your base, so attachments, details from other tables, etc can be sent out pretty easily as long as your data’s set up right

Once you've got the system for sending our referral emails dialed in, it’ll just be about recreating it for sending out emails for the administrative actions, really

Thank you.  This looks helpful.  I just don’t know how to go about setting this up so the different tabs work with each other.

Ah, the term you’re looking to google is ‘Airtable linked records', and here's Airtable's docs: https://support.airtable.com/docs/linking-records-in-airtable

I’d recommend watching a couple of youtube videos and then duplicating the base I created into your workspace and poking around