[tobe]

Has anyone hired a coordinator, or done research on advertising for domestic adoption, that I can leverage from? Any suggestion for papers in Organ, Washington, KS, Tx, south Carolina, Illinois?
Should use abbreviation?

Tks,
TB

[love to be mom]

Hi TB, We are from NY and started ads in may. We hired an adoption Consultant because we got tired of spending money on ads in the wrong places and where there were up to 6 other ads. It's working out better now and we are getting phone calls, but it is very frustrating because we've missed calls and spoken to women that never call back and two that were looking for money. I found it very difficult to place the ads myself because I didn't know how to go about finding out how many other ads would be there and if I was placing in the right area for our criteria. So lets say that we were looking for a biracial child, vermont or maybe Michigan would not be considered a good states to place ads. This is info we had no idea of. So we thought it best to stop wasting our money and pay someone who knows what they're doing. The charge is 150.00 per hr. for 1,000.00 worth of ads it takes about 3 hrs. Hope this was helpful. Rosa

[LouiseT]

I don't have any specific advice on placing ads in the states you mentioned. however we live in ny and did work withn an adoption coordinator to help place the ads for us.
of course she has done this before and knew the names etc., of all the papers in various states.

unfortunately, the calls we received were women who didn't even know if they wanted to place the child, and several women that were looking for us to wire money to them (one woman called me only from a pay phone - i couldn't call her, and she wanted me to wire her money that day. when i explained to her that my lawyer said i couldn't do that, she never called again.)

we spent $5,000 on ads that ran for 2 weeks in 18 states. Our consultant also charged $150. per hour which came out to about $3,000!!! this included time taken to call and order each ad, screen our potential birthmoms, etc.

i wouldn't do those ads again - way too expensive and no guarantee of results. i also didn't feel comfortable on the initial phone calls with the women that called. i ddin't know what to say! i didn't want to sound too pushy, but didn't want to seem disinterested either. i was waiting for some cue from the birthmoms but they kind of just said yes and no to any questions i asked. i tried talking about the weather, and where they lived, their other kids, how thery were feeling, etc. but that only lasts so long. it seemed like they hadn't made any decisions yet, so i didn't want to come right out and say" so can i adopt your child?"
i felt like i had to sell my self in a five minute phone call, and i guess i didn't know what to say...

maybe we just had some bad luck - timing is everything!!

good luck to you in whatever you decide.

Louise