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Hi, does anyone here have experience (positive or negative) with Adoption Connection or the IAC (we are in the SF Bay Area)? We have attended orientations at both agencies, and would really appreciate feedback from adoptive parents and birth parents who have worked with them. Please PM me! Thank you.
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DH and I signed up with IAC in May. We live 5 minutes away from their office in NC. I was also told about birth moms getting lots of profiles at a time but it doesn't bother us. You do pay a lot of money up front but you don't have to pay it all at once. We pay so much a month. I didn;t realize that different agencies had policies that just listed one flat rate for birth mother expenses. That would be nice. You can choose to have your profile only sent to birth moms who wont be as likely to have as many expenses but that makes your pool of birth moms to see your letter smaller. We just got our paperwork done and are waiting on home studies at this point. So we haven't had to deal with the agency too much but so far the experience has been good.
I know this is an old thread, but I came to this forum specifically to vent about Adoption Connection and saw your post and thought you might find my feedback helpful. I wish I had not signed up with them. I have been working with them for a year and I have had absolutely no contact from birthmothers. Not a single one. I paid $9,000 for their outreach program which promises to promote your online profile and printed letter. I just had an hour long conversation with their director today because I am so frustrated with their outreach coordinator. I had emailed and called her several times over the last 6 months requesting an update and asking her to let me know how many birthmothers they showed my letter to and what social media efforts have been taking place. She did not respond to any of my texts or emails at all. I got so fed up today that I sent a strongly worded email to the head of the agency, who called me and said they do not charge clients enough to be providing updates. I told her I paid $9,000, its been a year, and I haven't gotten a single word of communication from them since the day I wrote the check. After she "researched" my situation, she called me back and said they have only shown my printed letter to 11 prospective birthmothers over the last year. You should know, we said we are open to all races and a wide array of medical situations so its not that we are being too picky. I asked her if there is anything about our letter/profile that might be off putting or not coming across right, she said she hadn't read/seen it. You would think if you are going to call an unhappy client to try and smooth things over you would at least glance at their 1 page letter or online profile. Also, the creation our profile was frustrating as well. I am white and my husband is from India and has very dark skin. When we submitted our photos, the agency told us they wouldn't accept our profile until we use photoshop to lighten my husband's skin tone "a couple shades". She said it is because lighter skin tones come off more genuine and approachable. As offensive as that was, we did it because we had already paid the $9,000 and they were refusing to publish our profile if we didn't do it. They also HEAVILY edited our text. After reading our text, the outreach coordinator told us to make ourselves appear more "suburban" and take out anything that makes us seem offbeat. She told us we need to appeal to everyone, so the less uniqueness the better. We were handed a stack of other profiles and told to mimic those. We are artists who live in San Francisco and our profile reads like we are accountants from a suburb in the mid-west. it's very dry and says nothing about who we are as people. I am giving up on them and looking into hiring an adoption facilitator or lawyer to try and get us more visibility. We are also going to re-work our profile so it reflects who we are and isn't an obvious generic formula.
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