A referral front door for a community care provider

The client

Since 2014, MNCCS has provided culturally responsive care to Minnesota's East African communities: home and community-based services, housing support, waiver and targeted case management, and adult rehabilitative mental health services, from its main office in Minneapolis.

Many of its clients arrive through referrals from case managers and other providers. Each program has its own eligibility and needs different information to start, and a referral missing a release form or a date of birth means another round of phone calls before anyone can be helped.

What we built

• A clear site that explains each program in plain language, who it serves and what it requires, with a direct path to make a referral.
• Referral forms for five programs, each asking exactly what that program's intake team specified, with document uploads where a program needs them and a link to the county release form to fill in and attach.
• Routing that sends every referral to the inbox of the team that handles that program, so nothing waits in a shared mailbox.
• A careers section with the roles MNCCS is hiring for and an application form that goes straight to the hiring team.
• Light and dark themes, fast-loading images, and search and social previews that describe the organization accurately.

Designed around the intake team

We didn't design the referral forms from a template. The field lists came from the intake staff who process referrals every day, program by program, so a complete submission is everything they need to start. Programs that only accept referrals through the county don't get a form at all, which saves referrers from sending something that can't be used.

A good referral form is the intake team's checklist, handed to the person making the referral.

Small, reliable, and easy to run

The site is a lightweight React application on Vercel. Form submissions run through small edge functions that validate each submission, check file types and sizes, filter out spam with a hidden honeypot field, and deliver the referral by email with its attachments. If the email service is ever unreachable, the form opens the visitor's own email app with their message filled in, so a referral is never silently lost.

There's no database or admin system to maintain. For an organization whose staff time belongs with clients, that was the point.