June 25, 2006

Available Adoption Situations

Megan, we received an email the other day from a Birth Parent Specialist at your office letting us know about a potential situation. She gave us a few details and then asked if we wanted our profile shown. We were excited to receive this inquiry and know that it does not mean that we will be selected. Is this something that happens often? How often should we be checking our email? We check it daily, but want to ensure that we never miss out on an opportunity so let us know how often this happens and if we need to check it more than once a day. Have a great weekend. Thanks for your help!

Thanks for checking on this because this is very important! It is vital that our prospective adoptive families stay connected to us because you never know when or how you may be contacted. I do not want to encourage families to sit at their computer all day waiting for an email or to sit by the phone and wait for it to ring because that is just not physically possible and is completely unnecessary. We want you to continue with your normal routine as much as possible because it is vital to staying healthy and prepared for your match when the time comes. However, families do need to check their email once per day and check messages on cell phones/home phones etc. Sometimes, families have missed out on potential matches because they did not respond to an email in time or did not return a phone call in time. This is unfortunate and something we definitely want to avoid.

As a general rule, what you should take from this is that you do not need to attach your phone to your hip every second of the day or be online constantly, but you should not go several days without checking your emails or messages. Also, if you go on vacation, just let your Specialist know what dates you will be away and how to reach you during that time. We don’t want you to feel trapped at home, we will still get ahold of you if we need to no matter where you are.

Also, while I am speaking about contact with the agency and your Specialist, never assume that your specialist received your email/phone call and is not responding. With all the spam and viruses that come in and out of our offices, we have to protect against it and there have definitely been times when emails have been lost or haven’t made it to our inbox. As a general rule, if you haven’t received a response within a couple days, try again to reach your specialist. If it is urgent and you still have not received a response, contact someone else at our office so we can help. For example, we cannot use our email response to let clients know we are out of the office any longer because it was increasing spam and sending it back in large #s to everyone who emailed us. So, it may be that we are not in the office. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to call and ask one of the other specialists.

Finally, if you ever stop receiving this newsletter or have difficulty retrieving our emails, you may need to add us to your safe senders list. So, let us know and we can provide you with those directions. Let me know if you have any other questions and again, thanks for getting in touch with me about this!

Megan