Missionary Referral is a digital tool and process designed to connect interested non-member students with the Church’s full-time missionaries, allowing them to learn more about the gospel through a personal visit. It is fully embedded in the Companion system and integrated with the existing portals used by support staff.

Students may be referred through multiple pathways:

• By a member of their success network, including their Mentor, a PathwayConnect or EnglishConnect Gathering Missionary, an Institute Teacher, or a Pathway employee.

• Or by self-referral, through automated invitations sent via email, a follow-up survey, or the Companion chatbot.

Once a referral is initiated and the student gives proper consent, the system collects all available student information (e.g., name, email, address, phone) and prepares it for secure transmission to the Church Missionary Department, which then dispatches it to the appropriate full-time missionaries based on the student’s location. These missionaries receive the referral via the Preach My Gospel mobile app and initiate contact shortly thereafter.

Objective:
To enable a smooth, respectful, and compliant process for connecting non-member students with full-time missionaries, using digital tools embedded in the systems already used by mentors, gathering missionaries, teachers, and students themselves.

Expected Outcomes:

• Increased Reach and Flexibility: By allowing referrals from both staff and students through multiple channels, the system supports a wider range of gospel-sharing scenarios.

• Faster Missionary Contact: Referrals are automatically routed to the Preach My Gospel app, reducing delays in outreach and increasing engagement opportunities.

• Improved Oversight and Data Quality: Referral volume, source, and program data are collected weekly, supporting leadership visibility and planning.

• Respect for Agency and Privacy: Only referrals initiated with the student's explicit consent are processed and sent, ensuring compliance with data privacy principles.

The tool has demonstrated its operational reliability and flexibility. Whether initiated by mentors or students, referrals are routed efficiently and without manual handling. Although downstream outcomes (like first lesson attendance or baptism) are not yet tracked, early indicators—including volume growth and cross-program use—suggest that the tool is delivering on its primary goal of expanding missionary access to interested students. 

Lack of Feedback Loop

• Challenge: After a referral is sent, no status updates return from the Church Missionary Department, so Digital Operations cannot track whether contacts were called, taught, or baptized.

• Planned Improvement: Integrate a secure data feed—using a shared student identifier—to receive automated referral status updates (e.g., “Contacted,” “First Lesson Completed,” “Baptized”), enabling true end-to-end impact measurement.

Inconsistent Program Data

• Challenge: Free-text or mismatched entries in the “Current Campus/Program” field result in many referrals being classified as “Other,” undermining reporting accuracy.

• Planned Improvement: Introduce a controlled-vocabulary mapping layer that normalizes all incoming campus and program values (e.g., PathwayConnect, English Connect 3, Online Degree) before transmission, ensuring reliable classification and filtering.

Complex Automated Flow

• Challenge: The referral pipeline currently spans approximately 30 discrete steps, making it brittle, slow to process, and difficult to troubleshoot or update.

• Planned Improvement: Redesign the workflow into around seven modular sub-flows, consolidating common validation and enrichment logic into reusable components to reduce failure points and simplify maintenance.

Manual Reporting Overhead

• Challenge: Weekly Excel-based referral reports require manual generation and distribution, delaying insight delivery and preventing interactive analysis.

• Planned Improvement: Develop an embedded Power BI dashboard within the portal so leadership can self-serve on referral trends, drill into regional and program-specific data, and export visualisations on demand—eliminating static spreadsheet hand-offs.

1. Who can submit a referral? - Referrals can be submitted by a mentor, a PathwayConnect or EnglishConnect gathering missionary, an institute teacher, a Pathway employee, or by the student themselves via email, survey, or chatbot. 

2. What information must the user provide when making a referral? - The form requires the student’s name, email, and enrolled program, plus a brief context note and a checked consent box to confirm the student’s permission. All fields are pre-populated or validated to maintain data quality.

3. How is referral activity reported to leadership? - Each Monday, an Excel report is generated summarizing referral volumes by country, program, and week, giving leaders a clear snapshot of engagement without manual data gathering.

4. What does it mean when a referral is labeled as “Other”? Does it affect anything? - When a referral is labeled as “Other”, it means the system was unable to match the student’s program (such as PathwayConnect or EnglishConnect 3) to a known category. This usually happens due to inconsistent or unstructured data coming from upstream systems—for example, when the program field is entered as free text or is left incomplete. While this does not impact the delivery of the referral to the missionaries, it does limit reporting accuracy. Referrals categorized as “Other” cannot be properly grouped or filtered in dashboards, making it harder for leadership to analyze referral trends by program. A fix is planned to standardize program data through a controlled mapping process, which will eliminate the “Other” category and improve data quality.

5. Where is the Missionary Referral tool located? - The referral feature is embedded within the Mentor, Institute Teacher, and PathwayConnect Service Missionary portals—appearing as the “Refer a Friend/Student” option in each authorized user’s main menu.

6. How many automated steps are involved in the current referral pipeline? - The main flow consists of approximately 30 discrete steps, handling validation, enrichment, and routing—though this will be streamlined in an upcoming refactor.

7. What security measures protect student data during referral? - Only authorized roles see the referral option; every submission requires explicit consent capture; and data transmission leverages secure, role-based access controls within the portal.

8. What is the difference between the Missionary Assistant and the Missionary Referral? - The Missionary Assistant is a chatbot built to support missionaries with their administrative and teaching tasks. In contrast, Missionary Referral is a tool used to refer non-member students to full-time missionaries—either by mentors, staff, or the students themselves. The referral system is not part of the missionary support toolset. 

9. Why is there no follow-up on referred contacts, and how does that affect the process? -  Currently, there is no feedback loop between the Church Missionary Department and Digital Operations. This means that once a referral is sent, status updates such as “Contacted,” “First Lesson Completed,” or “Baptized” are not returned to the system.

This limitation affects the process in several ways:

• It prevents complete visibility into the student’s journey after the referral is made.

• It limits the ability to measure spiritual outcomes or the overall impact of the referral tool.

• It hinders data-driven decisions, since leadership cannot track how many referrals result in meaningful missionary engagement.

Efforts are underway to establish a two-way integration that would allow this follow-up data to flow back into the system for end-to-end tracking and reporting.