, the risk of them scamming you, all of that stuff.
So, the people who tend to be victims of scams are the ones who go a little too far on their own. Instead of, “Oh, I found someone, this seems good. Let me introduce you to my agency or attorney or give them your contact information so we can sort of continue down this plan and see if we continue to be a good match for each other.” Those are the ones that can manage whatever risks exist. And again, those risks exist whether you work with an agency or attorney or do your own outreach or any combination of those things.
Gotcha. Yeah, that's really, really important advice and certainly supports what we talked about in the episode about identifying potential scams. Really getting that connection with the agency and attorney, sort of as soon as you can, once things seem like a viable match.
Now a lot of, or almost all of the clients that I work with, want to focus on agencies and or attorneys that work in states where there's no revocation period, once the consent forms are signed because that's something that makes people, of course, understandably very nervous; that they would have the child in their custody and be caring for the child and then need to return custody to the birth mom.
So, with doing outreach, are you able to really sort of target those states where the laws are more protective of the adoptive parents? Or does that become more difficult to do?
The key for me is really not the revocation period, but where is it legal to even advertise, because that's not legal in all states. And so, I'm not an attorney.  I have them tell me, which states do you want to target? Especially with Google ads, I mean, social media and all that kind of stuff is a little bit different. Spreading the word through friends and family is different.
But if you're advertising, and specifically with Google ads, yeah, you can't advertise in all states. And so, you want to target states where it's legal. You want to target states, perhaps where you have friends and family, because if you have to go there for a few weeks, you can do so less extensively than if it's in another state. You want to target states where maybe ICPC dealing with bringing a child over state lines is more manageable than other states. And I leave all that to the attorney because those all have legal implications and I'm not an attorney.
So, I mean, some people may look at that revocation period, too. It's not something that I focus on or my clients tend to focus on. I leave it all to my clients and to their counsel.
Do you find that the agencies and attorneys that your clients are working with, are they totally accepting of people doing their own outreach always or some of them are? Or what do you find to be the perspective on that?
I find attorneys in particular very open to this, partly because a lot of attorneys can't do this. So, it is up to the adoptive parents to do it. I have found over time, and I've been doing this for well over 10 years now, in the early years, agencies frankly thought I was competing with them and that I was helping adoptive parents get nachos. No, no; that's what we do. So, I'm a competitor of yours.
That is really turned. I mean, now they refer clients to me, because the reality is there are a lot more people looking to adopt than there are men and women who are experiencing an unplanned pregnancy and considering adoption for their child.
And so, the more they can empower their families, the more opportunities will come to their adoptive parents and into the agency. So, that's good for all parties: the expectant parents, who may not have known about adoption; the adoptive parents, the agency, I mean, everyone sorts of benefits from that.
And so, I think over time, agencies have gotten–have had to frankly adapt and get a little more open to their families doing more things in this area on their own. And then bringing those opportunities back into the agency. Because ultimately, if an adoptive parent connects with a potential birth parent and those two parties are not good matches for each other, now that expectant parent can go to that agency because maybe there's another family that is a good match for them.
You know, one plus one equals three sometimes.
Can you share with us sort of the wildest or most inspiring outreach story that you've been a part of?
Oh, wow. Yeah, there's a blog post on my website. There's this family locally here in the Twin Cities–I'm in Minneapolis; suburb of Minneapolis–that owned a company that made like decals for cars, and they decked out their car with all these decals, “Hey, we're looking to adopt. If you hear this, if you hear of that, here's our phone number. Here's our website.” Their car was just, to the teeth, decked out of huge decals.
And people around the Twin Cities who I know would let me know, “Oh my God, we saw this car.” And I knew exactly, you know, after the third or fourth time, I knew exactly what the situation was.
And so, I called the phone number once and got in touch with them and we started talking. And it turns out that even though they did all these decals and we're certainly getting opportunities and a lot of positive buzz, they had posted something on Craigslist of all places, which you do not think of for adoption.
And I rarely think of for our adoption. But anyway, they posted something on Craigslist. Someone was experiencing an unplanned pregnancy on Craigslist, searching for whatever. They happen to search on adoption stuff for whatever reason. They found this couple. And that was the match. That's how it came. I mean that is just wild.
And again, Craigslist. It's free. Is it going to work? I don't know. Are you comfortable doing that? If you're not comfortable doing that, then don't do it. If you're not comfortable putting a billboard up on a busy highway, don't do that. But it's just one of those you-never-know kind of stories.
Yeah, that is pretty wild. Well, I really appreciate your expertise, Hal.
Before we wrap up, you've alluded to a few things, but can you tell us a little bit more about My Adoption Adviser, exactly what you do and how you help pre-adoptive parents with their outreach efforts?
Sure, sure.  We are all about empowering adoptive parents to take an active role in this process. Certainly, work with a top notch agency, a top notch attorney, but you can make your own luck too, and that's really where we started.
So, we have a handful of e-learning courses that we offer and then a bunch of different services. I touched on a couple of courses. Just the adoption, advertising and networking course, which is all about understanding what are these opportunities that I could do to kind of get the word out and what can I afford to do?
And ultimately, as you're going through the course, you're developing your own personal outreach plan, literally. You know, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to do this. She's going to do this. Here's what we're going to do by literally create this outreach plan that you then start executing against as soon as you finish the course.
So, that's a great course; Identify Red Flags and Adoption Scams I alluded to; that's also an important course. And again, the big tip in that course is to work even more closely, frankly, with your adoption team, your agency and attorney, not less when you're doing outreach work. Even more closely with them.
But just knowing what those red flags are. You know, a red flag doesn't mean something's going to go south, but it might mean that you want to keep your eyes open even more. And if you have a lot of red flags, maybe those are issues. So, just knowing what those things are super important.
And then on the service side, we have profile and website services for adoptive parents. I don’t think I have said this yet. But for adoptive parents, job Number One is to create an outstanding adoption profile. Job Number Two, is exposure. Get that profile in front of as many potential birth parents as you possibly can.
You, Nicole, with your services, your clients work with multiple agencies. That's a great way to get more exposure than just one agency, obviously. And then doing adoption outreach, with or without your approach, is another great way to get more exposure.
So, we help people create their profiles, create their websites. We run Google Ads campaigns for adoptive parents; I talked about that a little bit.
Awesome. Yeah. And that is definitely one thing that I tell people, when I tell them about you, is that you have information for people with all different budget levels and all different approaches that they can take within those budget levels. So, I think that's really important. Because like you were saying before, people come to this after having spent a lot of money in an in other areas. So, as much as they can do without piling on the cost is always really helpful.
Well, I really appreciate you being here today, Hal. Again, it's Hal Kauffman. He's founder of My Adoption Advisor. He mentioned his website, which is myadoptionadvisor.com You can also email him at |||EMAIL_ADDRESS|||