[Nelson]

I get asked quite a lot about newspaper advertising. I know many lawyers recommend it to their clients, and I have heard of a few people who have connected with EPs that way. I must confess I'm not a big fan of the practice.

First, it's very expensive. I have friends who have spent as much as $4000 placing two-line ads in a dozen or so Sunday classifieds across the nation for two weeks and gotten not a peep. That seems like a lot of money for a shot in the dark, tiny little ad that can't say much more than "we want to adopt."

Secondly, I believe that generally–and I know I’m making some assumptions here–the sort of EP who would be searching for help in a Sunday paper is one who is rather estranged from the social support system that exists, in a fairly accessible way, in most communities. While I'm fully aware that many EPs are in this situation, if you choose to advertise in papers you should also be prepared–financially, emotionally, and mentally–for dealing with a more resource intensive-adoption process.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I strongly believe that your goal as a PAP is to connect with the EP who is right for you, not just any one. Your chances of doing that are greatly enhanced if the person who calls you already knows something about you, i.e. has read your letter or been referred to you by someone who knows you.

To really break this topic down, I have to speak in marketing terms. I know this upsets people, but when you start talking about advertising or outreach, marketing considerations do come into play. I’m not talking about “writing to persuade” or “selling yourself.” That’s a level of mercantile, inauthentic thinking that I believe is inappropriate to the adoption process. But the reality is that you only have so much money, so much time, and so much emotional life you can expend on this part of your life. Everyone approaching this journey has to take stock of these resources to see how and where they are best spent.

So for each outreach initiative, you must balance its cost (emotional, financial, temporal), its effectiveness (what kind of information you get out and how many people see it), and the results (what sort of connections you make with your intended audience).

If I were in sales (and I used to be), I would break down the people who respond to my outreach as “hot leads,” “warm leads” and “cold leads.” In my mind, someone who calls me from a 2 line ad that says “we want to adopt” is a cold lead. They know nothing about me specifically. They are just reaching out to someone, anyone, who can help them. A warm lead would be someone who has read something about me–my DBML, my web site, a sign I posted–but may not have yet formally entered the process of making an adoption plan, meaning s/he hasn’t called a lawyer or agency, hasn’t been vetted by anyone, has no proof of pregnancy that I know of, etc. Hot leads, it follows, not only knows something about me specifically, but has also taken some concrete steps toward making an adoption plan.

By this way of thinking, you must understand that the colder the lead, the more resources it will take to make a strong connection with them, the sort of connection that will lead to a successful placement. Resources such as time spent talking on the phone, getting paperwork filled out, getting proper medical care, and all the other steps in the process. All of those steps require an emotional investment, and obviously, the more steps between meeting and placement, the greater the chances that the process will go awry, and usually, the greater the financial cost of the adoption.

Which gets me back to newspaper ads, but also outreach more generally. I think newspaper advertisements, even if they are successful, generate very cold leads. I believe that your best chance of connecting with an expectant parent who is right for you is to put yourself out there authentically and genuinely. So even if you have all the time, money, and emotional resilience in the world, I still think it would be vastly wasted on random, shotgun approaches like classified advertisements.

Classified advertising is on some level a throwback to the days–not so long ago–when the average person had few affordable options for communicating beyond their local circle of connections. We now live in a wired world, and the threshold of access to those wires is very low. Almost anyone from any part of the socio-economic spectrum can distribute and access incredible amounts of information with relative ease.

I believe your time, love, and money are better spent of ways to get your genuine communication–namely, your DBMLetter–out into the world. More fruitful than Sunday classifieds, the “friends and family network,” local organizational outreach, personal web sites, online registries, business cards, and all the other similar great ideas on this board all provide fairly cost-effective ways of communicating something comprehensive about who you are.
Thus you will be reaching out in a genuine manner, sharing something real about yourself. When the phone rings, you will have already sparked a flame of real interest in the person on the other end of the phone. In this warmth, your chance of really connecting with that person is going to be greatly enhanced.