In the sports world, you’ll often hear a coach talking about placing his or her players in the best position to succeed. At Adoptimist, we try and do exactly same thing. But for all the targeted web advertising and social media outreach we perform, none of it guarantees your success. It still takes dedicated families with engaging profiles to make adoption matches and connections.
So much of your adoption success will be based on factors that are out of your hands, like luck, chance, and even a birthmother’s personal preferences. You need to do everything you can to put yourself in the best position to succeed, should you get the opportunity.
Given that it is once again the start of a new year and a time reassess and reflect, we present you with this simple strategy to help put your family in a position to succeed with your adoption: Perform one online update a day to help make your adoption dreams a reality. One update a day, every day. And if you are short on ideas on how to do this, we have assembled some quality suggestions that can help you meet this goal:
• Make Your Adoption Profile A Little Bit Better. On Adoptimist, at the Premium level, you are rewarded for updating your profile with a coveted spot on our homepage. But even if you are using a different plan or you have your own website, updating your profile is still totally worth the extra effort. Even just one update can make your profile a little bit better. Maybe it’s adding a new photo. Maybe it is removing one. Work on sharpening your profile text. Be succinct and brief. Adding photo captions is an often overlooked opportunity to tell a little bit more about your family. The point is: your profile is never finished until you have adopted your child and your adoption search ends. So keep at it!
• Don’t Just Create A Social Media Post, Boost It. As platforms like Facebook and Instagram have become more and more ad-centric your chances of getting a non-sponsored post seen by the right person have dimmed. So be prepared to spend some of your advertising dollars to help get your posts seen. The best part is you don’t have to spend a lot of money to sponsor a post (often just a few dollars on most platforms). And it can really help expand your outreach.
• Diversify Your Social Media. Some platforms just aren’t relevant for your adoption journey. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment posting on different platforms. Learn what is most effective for you but as much as you can, spread your posts across several platforms and this will help you discover which are best.
• Create A Video. You’d be surprised at how many families still don’t have an adoption video. These days it is so easy to film one from your smartphone. But if you are feeling shy about it, then how about a photo slideshow video with a song and captions? Once you have a video, your posting possibilities begin to increase. You can post a video to Instagram Reels, Tik Tok, and Youtube just to name a few. And that means more outreach opportunities for your family that a lot of other families won’t be able to match.
• Create A Story. Stories are a fun, less formal way of promoting your family. Stories generally have a limited run (24 hours) so you can consistently post new ones. You can run Stories on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Play with photo filters and text overlays and add another dimension to your adoption marketing.
• Update With A Purpose. Don’t bother with half-hearted updates. You might actually weaken your profile. Instead, focus on quality updates that show who you are and what you are about as a family. Come up with a mantra for your family and use your updates to reinforce it. If you find that a particular update doesn’t help the cause, consider skipping it altogether.
Committing to a daily updating regimen may seem like a lot to take on. Everyone is so busy and life can be so difficult at times. But setting aside a little time each day for your adoption advertising can really make a difference in the quantity and quality of your outreach. And psychologically, you may come to feel more empowered as you begin to take back some control in a journey that is so often dominated by chance and waiting. Don’t beat yourself up if you come up short on your updating goals. As long as you are making gradual and measurable progress with quality updates, you will be helping increase your chances at adoption success.