Creating your adoption profile is one of the most important and daunting tasks that a couple must face when beginning the process of a domestic adoption. It's difficult to capture your life in twenty pages or less. How do you choose photos? What do you say about them? What do you share about yourselves and the future you hope to have with your children? You struggle with sounding braggy, or boring, or superficial, or fake. It's just difficult. But it can also be fun! Be willing to let others see your book before your send it off for print and call one people you really trust to be totally real with you! We even sent our proofs to our case worker, they have loads of experience watching birthmoms look at profiles. Let me share some tips with you about how to begin, what to consider, and who to team up with.
- Poor Quality Photos=Poor Quality Profile pages. If you don't have great photos, invest in some. Find a photographer, maybe from your church or your local area, and have them come to your home, your workplace, or to favorite spots you like to hang out, etc. Shoot some new photos. They'll be current, good quality, and show your day to day lives. You can usually do this for around $150, including the rights to the all the photos.
- Your Book Cover needs to say "You want to meet us!!!!" I know this sounds trite, and maybe even feels unauthentic to you, but the reality is birthmoms sometimes don't even look past the cover of the book. So make sure your cover is AWESOME! Get opinions from friends, use your most special photo (not anything from your wedding please—ever–most folks don't hang out in their wedding attire and birthmoms assume you're married.)
- Categorize. Create categories for your book such as: Day to day life; travel; our work; our home; our families. Begin your book with a SHORT message about who you are and why you desire children. End your book with a message to your birthmom, also SHORT.
- Keep your Words Concise. Social workers will tell you that most birthmoms do not want to sit and read copious amounts of words. Keep your words short, simple, light-hearted, and genuine. It's great to have some pages that don't even have words if your photos speak for themselves.
Here is a link to our profile that we created with the help of a dear Christian friend, Nancy Engberg. She is creative, loving, tenacious, and will be honest with you about how your book is shaping up. There are many links on this website to other people's profiles as well, so peruse, do your homework and find something that 'speaks' to you and use it as a jumping point. I also encourage you to look at other sites as well. We had great success with our book… I'm sitting here looking at the outcome, she's just adorable. She very much enjoys looking at our profile book and in years to come, it will be a fun way to share the story in an authentic and easy way from the very beginning of our journey to bring a child into our family. How awesome is that?
http://nancydrewcreative.com/adoption-services/adoption-profiles/album/christopher-and-jessica
May God bless you on your adoptions journey!!!
