Every family who reaches out, in any of six languages, lands in one referral system that the team, its partners and its board can all see.
What happened
- Rebuilt the site with quick exit on every page
- Translated it into six community languages
- Routed every intake form into one referral system
- Let partner agencies refer families directly
- Flagged referrals that sit too long
- Gave the board a live view of every referral
Result: One front door in six languages, and grant applications in with provincial and federal funders.
How it worked
For a family new to the country and caring for a child with a disability, the website is often the first door they knock on. That door has to feel safe, and it has to speak their language. Some people reach out from a home where it is not safe to be seen looking for help, which is why a quick-exit button matters: one tap and the page is replaced by an ordinary search page. Others need the page adjusted before they can read it, or need it in Arabic, Swahili, Krio, Tigrinya or French before they can read it at all. For this audience these are not extras. They decide whether someone asks for help or closes the tab.
Behind the door, requests used to live in phone calls, texts and memory. CT replaced that with one referral system. The three intake forms on the site, get support, refer a family and contact, all land in it, and partner agencies log the families they refer in the same place. Each referral shows who owns it, what stage it is at and whether anyone needs to follow up. When a referral sits too long or a partner has not replied, the system nudges the right person, so no family is left waiting because a message got buried.
The board sees the same picture on a live dashboard: how many families are being served, how quickly they are connected and where things stall. Those are the numbers funders ask for, and they now back grant applications with provincial and federal funders. Next to the site sits a multilingual accessibility toolkit, built to WCAG 2.1 AA, that explains a family’s accessibility rights, gives them templates for asking for accommodations and walks them through local services in six languages.
Put together, this is community management, even if it does not look like a member directory or an events calendar. The community here is the families, the partner agencies who refer them, the volunteer navigators who speak their languages and the board that answers to funders. CT keeps them all in one place. Each family has one record with their language and history, partners see the referrals they sent, navigators sign up for trainings and get checked in at the door, and the team can message any group in the language they read. The job is the same one a festival or a professional network has: know who your people are, and do not lose anyone.