About eight months ago, The Consortium launched a new process to accept and track Consortium referrals. We get them often through our alumni outreach efforts, but we also added a new referral page to our website in November inviting any visitors to submit the names of potential Consortium members.

We know word-of-mouth is a very powerful tool to draw potential members to our organization. Why not encourage people who already love The Consortium to send us the names of people we should contact?

Since then, visitors to our website have used the page to submit the names of 123 prospective Consortium members. Among those Consortium referrals, visitors referred three prospects twice and one of them three times!

The new page has been a big help: Fans of The Consortium know people who ought to be Consortium members. More than one in 10 of those 123 names have turned into Consortium students. That’s right: At least 13 of those Consortium referrals are starting their MBA programs in the fall.

Who Sends the Most Consortium Referrals?

The last time we looked at this particular topic was in late November, shortly after we started accepting online referrals through the web-based form. At the time, with fewer Consortium referrals, current students delivered the highest share of names — 53 percent came from students.

Now, that number is down to 50 percent, but current students are still the largest source of Consortium referrals. We are also gratified to see that the second largest category is Consortium alumni, who provide 32 percent of our referrals. After that, member school representatives provide 7 percent of Consortium referrals. The rest come from “other,” which likely means individuals with no connection to The Consortium whatsoever.

Since November, we have received 108 referrals from people with a connection to one of our 18 member schools. That means they were either a student, an alumnus or an employee of one of those schools.

By a large share, most of those 108 names came from representatives at the University of Southern California. You can refer to the graph below to see the breakdown.