Adoption Profile Do's and Don'ts

Adoption Profiles That Match Quickly

If you're feeling overwhelmed at the thought of creating your adoption profile, or even worse, have a profile that you don't feel confident in, I get it, my friend; I've been there. In fact, in my own journey, I rushed through answering the list of questions that my agency had provided and just picked out some photos that I felt were good enough, and I sent them off to them. Because I was in a hurry to get a match, I was in a hurry to bring home my baby. But when our profile was shown twice, we didn't get picked. I was worried; I knew that there must be something wrong.

It was only when I was visiting with a friend that she pointed out that I was missing one key element from my profile. And once I added that missing element to my profile, we matched within 30 days and brought home our daughter. Since then, I've gone on to help over 1,000 families with their adoption profiles. And I have constructed a list of do's and don'ts when it comes to your adoption profile. In this video, I'm going to walk you through the five things that you must do and give you a list of things to avoid when it comes to creating your adoption profile. Oh, and if you stick around till the end, I'll tell you what that one key missing element was that helped me match more quickly.

1. Make it easy for people to get to know you.

Now the first thing you want to do is make it easy for someone to get to know you. And the key to making it easy for someone to get to know you is to not provide too much information about your family. Now, if you've been around any of those adoption Facebook groups or talked to any adoption professionals, you've likely heard that there was one thing that someone picked out about this family. So hearing me say not to include too much information may feel a little counterintuitive. But the goal is to share stories about your family that really help someone make a connection with you. So in our case, when it came to our daughter's adoption, the fact that we were Steelers fans was something that her at-birth parents really leaned into, because she felt an affinity and a connection with the US based upon that. Now if I had talked about the fact that I was also a Cowboys fan, because that's how I was raised, and that I have, you know, college football teams that we follow, and all of that, that would have been too much information to say, really, that we were focused on sports or that sports were something that was important in our family. Instead, telling stories about the fact that we were Steelers fans allowed us to really kind of hone in on the key information. And I am not sure every detail could have been overwhelming. You see, when you share every single detail about your family, a couple of things happen: they either get bored or they don't want to read that level of detail. And quite honestly, they can kind of get the idea that your football fans, without you saying that you watch multiple different teams, are second, and even worse, they get confused. And when they get bored or confused, they're simply going to move on to the next stack of profiles in front of them. So while you may be tempted to share every single detail about your family, you want to avoid that because that's going to make you confused.

Instead, you want to get focused on your core family values—those things that are really important to you. And you want to tell stories around those core family values to make it easier for someone to get to know you. So if you like traveling together as a family, then you want to tell stories about your travels. If you like watching football together as a family, then you want to tell stories about watching football together as a family. And all the while, you want to make sure you're weaving this back to what life would be like with this future child.

So if you like traveling and you want to tell stories about the trips that you've taken, then also tell stories about the types of trips that you would like to take in the future with this child. Or if you like football and you want to take this child to a professional football game, then you want to talk about that in your profile as well. Now if you need help deciding what your family values are or what to put in or not in your profile, then head on over to my adoption coach.com backslash profile. And there you'll see how you could work with me one-on-one, where I can help you get really clear about the story of your family and help you put it into your adoption profile.

2. Appeal to different learning styles. 

The next thing you want to do is appeal to the different learning styles. Now I know this is going to sound a little scientific for a minute, but hang with me; every one of us learns in a different way. You may be learning from the fact that you're watching me on video; you're seeing how my hands move. And you're really making a connection with my face and paying attention to what I'm saying from that perspective. Or you may be watching the YouTube channel but also multitasking and having your phone somewhere else, letting the video play, and just listening to the audio. Or you could be listening to the podcast version or reading the blog. And all of those indicators are of how you learn; you may learn visually, you may learn from hearing, you may learn from doing or from, you know, kind of thinking through and imagining what I'm talking about.

Having your profile appeal to all of those different learning types is critically important. Because you can't say you only want to match with a birth mother who listens best or learns best by listening, right? You like that, but that's just not going to happen. So you want to make sure that the stories that you're telling about your family values and how they come to life every day are really optimized based upon the different learning styles; you want to make sure you have highly descriptive language; and you want to make sure that somebody could close their eyes.

And really imagine what you're talking about. You want to make sure that you're using video because someone being able to hear your voice and see you do the thing you're talking about makes a different imprint in their brain and makes you different and differently connected with them. And you want to make sure that when it comes to your graphics, you're being very clear and precise in what you're communicating, because the combination of all of those things ultimately makes you more memorable, which is really important when it comes to being picked by an executive family.

3. Make sure your profile is optimized for viewing on phones.

And above all else, you've got to make sure that your profile is optimized for someone looking at it on their phone. I cannot tell you how many times I see someone posting an image from their profile book onto a social media account. And that is just a huge critical error. Because you can't really read that well and because it makes it harder for me to learn more about you, I just scroll right past you. And when your profile is continually scrolled past in a Facebook group or somewhere else, then that tells the algorithm that you are not important and you're not contributing to that account or to that group. And so therefore, Facebook is going to deprioritize you, which means they're not going to show your profile as often. And that really is a big mistake.

In fact, 95% of the expectant parents I polled said that they were looking at profiles on their phones. It doesn't matter if it was a profile book; you know, an attorney or an agency emailed them. Or if they were looking at social media, a website, or a video, they were looking at it on their phone. And when I observed them looking at a profile on their phone, I would often see them get frustrated.  And I would ask them, Why are you frustrated right now, or what was that face for? And they would say it was hard to read their profile. And that makes me very upset because they look like a nice couple. But if I have to pinch and try to zoom in and out and I can't read it easily from my phone, then I'm not interested, and they just move on to the next family. So don't put all the hard work into creating a profile to only fumble it when it comes to the goal of actually making it easily visible and really miss out on opportunities.

This key missing element helped me match more quickly.

As a result of that, when I asked expectant parents what types of profiles they wanted to see, 98% of them said they wanted to see a profile video and a profile website. And when I asked them what they expected to see on those two things on the profile, video, and website, they said that they wanted to see the story of your family. And that was the missing element in my own adoption profile when I created it the first time.

You see, when I sat down with my friend, she was like Amanda. It looks like you just answered some questions, sent in some information about you guys, and randomly attached some pictures to it and sent it off. And that was the missing element. She

said, I just don't see the story of you guys. I don't see how important travel is to you guys. And education is important. And you know the trips that you take to see the football stadiums and things of that nature.

She was like, I don't see who you are from what you've answered here. And that was the missing element—telling the story of our family in a way that made it easy to get to know us—that didn't provide too much detail and really allowed her to immerse herself in our world to determine if that was the world that she wanted for her child. And once we made that update, we actually brought home our daughter within 30 days.

If you want to hear more about how you can leverage your adoption profile to match quickly, check out the Sara and Mark story because they brought home their son in just five months.