If you’ve ever eaten at a little-known restaurant, or shopped at a small business, someone working there might ask you where you heard of the place. For business owners, it’s useful to know where customers and patrons are coming from, and what markets they might be missing out on.
Public services and programming are no different. While developing programming to help youth, knowing how youth are finding out about the program is invaluable data to collect. The table below is from our report covering truancy programs, where we took a close look at where referrals to those programs came from. As you can see, almost 80% of the time, youth were referred to the program from a school. The county attorney had not yet been involved in those cases.
The data here can give program coordinators some insight into who already knows about their program and services, and who doesn’t. Information like this can be used in a variety of ways. For one, if a truancy program tried different methods of reaching parents, they could look at the data through time to see if their outreach strategy is working or not. Where referrals come from can also provide insight into when youth are receiving interventions. In the example above, the county attorneys were not involved as much in referring, which could imply that youth are receiving intervention before getting deeper into the juvenile justice system.
The JJI has released a number of reports looking deeply into specific program types, and in many of these, we have presented data about referral sources. We encourage you to take a look through these and see what implications they could have for your program type!