Did Advertising Influence our Decsion to Adopt?

    For some time now I have been following the Twitter feed of AdoptUSKids and before that I would occasionally drift back to their website (www.adoptuskids.org) and page through the photo listings of the children who were available for adoption and who are just waiting for a family to call their own.  The state of Ohio (and most other states) has a similar list (http://www.adoptionphotolistingohio.org) that I also have spent time paging through.  In both of these lists I have been overcome by the sheer number of children.  When looking at photographs and biographies of these children I have just had to stop when I realized that there were 260 pages to look at, each with 15 photographs and some of those were sibling groups and not just one child.  To get my hands around these numbers I made regular use of the search tools to filter the search results using all sorts of criteria.  I’ve searched by state, by gender, by race, by age, and I would have searched using other criteria if could.  For obvious reasons of safety and privacy the general public cannot search using religion or other personal information.  Once our homestudy is complete and in our hands (which should be any day now), we can register with AdoptUSKids and gain access to additional information about the children we are interested in.  At this point, I am uncertain just how much information will be made available to us when that happens.

    This week Adopt US Kids tweeted this question, “Did a TV, radio or print ad influence our decision to adopt?” and asked folks to share their stories through www.humaninterestfilms.com.  As I explained in my blog post, Why Now?, we always thought we’d have more children but, for a variety of reasons, the time was never right, until now.  For some time, years in fact, whenever things would begin to look like our lives might be making a way for us to think about kids again, I would find myself returning to the photo listings and imagining what it would be like to add another child to our family or what sort of child would fit our already quirky collective.  When we finally made the decision to get serious about adopting again, we were still looking at the photo lists and each week when AdoptUSKids would tweet a new pair of featured children, I would click on the link and have a look.

    So did a TV, radio or print ad influence our decision to adopt?  Well, it probably wasn’t TV or radio, and we didn’t see too many ads in the newspaper, but the Internet had a lot to do with keeping us connected and sustaining our interest in adoption.  It hasn’t happened yet of course.  We expect to receive our completed homestudy in the next two weeks (and then get it revised after we move) and then we will see where the road takes us.   Whatever happens, the State of Ohio, AdoptUSKids, Twitter, and others have certainly had some influence on getting us to this place.