I live in a country (Egypt) where you sometimes have to get a bit creative with things. A business I work on needed a referral programme, as they wanted to be able to pay a referral commission to people and businesses that sent customers their way.

I love jumping on these ideas quickly when I'm feeling inspired and a couple of hours later it was all done!

This kind of idea is easy to implement (in theory or when you know how) on a digital business, where you create an affiliate programme, generate a link, have the customer use that link and when someone buys from it, a commission is paid.

Offline business, not so easy.

My first 'go to' is always to try and find an online tool, and I did, I found some things but nothing that did exactly what I wanted, kind of like a refer-a-friend tool, and also nothing that didn't have a fairly hefty price tag, and when you just want to test something out you don't want to invest loads up front, so back to the drawing board. I wanted to make this work using free tools.

We then came up with an attractive offer, decided to put together a page, partner application, and 3 ways to refer a customer. I'll show you what this looks like!

To begin with the referral programme is by invitation only, so there needed to be a page on the website that was not linked into the main menu.

https://www.kitesurfinginstructors.com/partners

In this case the business pays 25% for referrals and also offers advertising for partners to encourage people to collaborate, which are stated on the site.

I created a form in Carrd to gather all the key details we needed from each partner, which saves a bunch of time in the back and forth, so you get everything you need in one go.

Then we needed to share how partners can refer people to the business, and there are 3 ways:

1) WhatsApp
Classic and widely used messaging tool, which is free.

2) Form
Created another Carrd form (as the site was already in Carrd) to collect the referral and referee data.

3) Calendly
Free booking tool for (1) booking type, which is all you need, so when you create the calendar booking type there's an option to add questions for the person booking, be sure to add a question, "How did you hear about us?" so they can mention the person referring them.

I then created a graphic in Canva with the details which can be downloaded to a phone or computer for handy access, making it easy for people to refer on the fly.

And Voila!

Projects like this can of course evolve and other things can be added and adapted, so go ahead, get creative!