The world of classified advertising is a minefield for potential adoptive parents.

How do you advertise to find a birthmother who may be interested in making an adoption plan for her child?
Where do you call, and what do you ask?
How can you tell whether you're getting a good rate for your ad?
And how can you tell whether your ad campaign is succeeding or failing?
These questions and others like them keep popping up on AOL Adoption Forum bulletin boards. I work as the manager of news technologies at a midsize Indiana newspaper, and my wife Pam and I have fought through the minefield and have found some of the answers -- our son was born in late 1997 and we completed a private adoption in 1998.

In about 18 months since we began advertising in newspapers, we have been called by about four dozen birthmothers, birthfathers or their relatives and friends who wanted to talk about possible adoption plans. It can work for you, too.

Remember, this advice is free, and although it's based on our experience, you might conclude that that's what it's worth!

First things first: If you don't have an adoption lawyer, get one, and seek his or her advice about advertising. The best lawyers for private adoption are those whose entire practice is in private adoption. If you're looking, check the Yellow Pages in your state's capital city or principal city, or call the state bar association for advice. Having the right lawyer can be much more important than anything else in the adoption process.

Wording Your Ad

Be yourself.

Despite what you may have read in some ads, you do not have to be a millionnaire with a stay-at-home spouse who just happened to get a doctorate before deciding not to work outside the home. You do not have to live on a 4,000-acre ranch within walking distance of Disney World. You do not have to be anything other than you are.

Although you should do your best to avoid papers with lots of adoption ads in them, you are not in competition with these other adoptive parents because different birthmothers have different visions of what their child's life should be like, and -- fortunately -- most know better than to expect all of us to be Bill Gates.

Most birthmothers seeking adoption plans, or even thinking about it, are in bad shape emotionally and financially (sometimes physically, too), and whatever you have to offer -- if it appears genuine -- is quite a lot better than what they have going for them.

Pam and I told people we were professionals who lived in a suburban area near good schools and playgrounds, and that the birthmother's child would be raised in a Christian atmosphere full of laughter, learning and teddy bears. That happens to be true, and it worked in finding potential birthmothers for us. There are things about you and your life that are worth focusing on, too, especially those that will suggest stability and contentment for the child.

Keep your ad simple and relatively short. You are not writing a doctoral thesis; you're trying to get a phone call. BOLDFACE CAPITAL letters are OK for a headline of some sort, but don't go for gimmicks like decorating the ad with hearts, teddy bears, boxes or other graphic devices. These cost money and add little to your message. Most birthmothers aren't impressed by the glitz, anyway.

You are certain to have to overcome some disappointments. Not all birthmothers are looking for the same thing in adoptive parents. If the one who calls you is looking for a Catholic and you're of another faith, or none at all, you won't be getting her child. If she has her heart set on someone with blonde hair and blue eyes and you've got brown hair and brown eyes, it won't happen, either. But eventually you'll find someone who either likes the life you have to offer or is willing to accept it. That may be the birthmother of the child you get to take home from the hospital.

Where to Advertise

First, consult with your lawyer. If your state's laws are favorable to private adoption, advertising in midsize and county-seat newspapers in your state may be the best choice. If the laws in your state are not favorable, follow your lawyer's advice about which states are more favorable, and advertise in the midsize and smaller papers in those places.

The reason to avoid the biggest metropolitan papers is that although you can reach a lot of people, it costs more than most of us want to pay. It's better to find the papers in your target state with the lowest cost for the widest distribution. It's easily computed through what advertisers call "cost per thousand."

Here's how to do it:

Go to your local library's reference section and get a book called "Editor & Publisher Year Book." It's a listing of all the newspapers in the United States, including addresses, phone and fax numbers, circulations, etc. Photocopy the pages for your state and take them home. (If you're computer-minded, you can do the rest on a spreadsheet, and if you're not, a legal pad and a calculator will do just fine.)

Write down the names of all the papers in your state with circulations between 10,000 a day and about 200,000 a day. If that's too many for you to deal with, cut it off at 100,000 a day. (The Sunday circulations will be higher, but don't worry about those.) We found newspapers with fewer than 10,000 papers sold a day generally can't compete with the ad rates of larger newspapers. You're also making fewer copies of the ad, so fewer people potentially can see it.

Take a morning or afternoon and call the classified advertising departments at each of the newspapers on your list. You can reach them through the main-switchboard phone numbers you got out of the E&P Year Book.
You want to know two things -- how much it would cost to run your ad at the paper's lowest rate (usually two weeks, sometimes longer), and how many adoption classified ads ran in their paper yesterday and last Sunday. It helps to have the ad written down so you can read it to them, or in a letter that you could e-mail or fax to them. Write down the ad reps' answers and tell them you'll get back to them if you choose to advertise there.

The reason you're asking about the number of ads is to cut down on the clutter a birthmother has to read to get to your wonderful ad. If there are more than about half a dozen ads daily or a dozen ads on Sunday, that's a lot for her to work through. Cross those papers off your list.

Now comes the math: Cost per thousand is how much it costs to have 1,000 copies of your ad printed. It helps you understand whether smaller papers are more "efficient" than larger ones at getting your message across. (Of course, the most "inefficient" newspaper is worth the money if the right woman is reading it!)

Suppose a newspaper has a circulation of 10,000 a day and 40,000 on Sunday. That's 100,000 a week, or 100 units of 1,000. Also suppose it would charge you $100 a week to run the ad. The cost per thousand is $100 divided by 100 units of 1,000, or $1 per thousand. (The reason you need a calculator or spreadsheet is that the math never works out this easily! Rounding off the circulations to the nearest thousand and the ad rates to the nearest dollar makes things a little less messy.)

In Indiana, our home state, we found ads ranging from 12 cents per thousand to $2.80 per thousand. This meant some publishers were charging about 25 times as much as others for the same oomph! We found good deals with few other ads at 45 cents to 65 cents per thousand.

By the time you get done with this, you'll be able to tell whether a $25-a-week ad at a small paper is better or worse than a $75-a-week ad at slightly larger paper or a $150-a-week at a bigger one.

Advertise in one or two midsize papers and two or three county-seat papers at the same time, preferably in different parts of the state so they don't overlap. In the bigger papers, more people will see your ad, but there will be more ads. In the smaller papers, fewer people will see it, but yours might be the only one.

Two other options to consider:

Your state's press association may have a plan that enables you to advertise in many of their member newspapers at the same time. These have costs-per-thousand higher than the very lowest-cost newspapers, but far below what you'd pay to buy each of the papers individually. (These lists sometimes include the smaller papers that were ignored above; this is the most cost-effective way to get into those.)
The bad news about these plans is that the prices they charge may seem expensive, especially if they run the ad only once. You should be buying all seven days in individual newspapers -- many people try just Sundays, and get stuck in the more crowded Sunday traffic from other ads. You can get the name and number of your press association from the E&P Year Book.

Also, you might consider "zoned" editions of your state's largest newspapers. These go to specific neighborhoods, towns or counties, not a paper's full circulation, so their ad rates are lower.
These publications often have titles like "Neighbors" or "People," and usually come out once or twice a week. They have the sort of "neighborhood news" about clubs and Scouting often missing from big-newspaper news columns.

Ask the ad reps at the state's largest papers about whether you might advertise in their zoned editions, what the circulations of those editions are, how much it would cost to advertise at the best rate and how many adoption ads they carried in the last edition. Then compare them with the other newspapers.

About Shoppers

Some people have asked about "shoppers" -- the free or nearly free all-ad papers found in grocery stores, gas stations, etc., that help people sell cars or bicycles or find the best garage sales.

These papers seem to offer pretty good costs-per-thousand, but in general they didn't work well for us. (Pam and I met a man who completed an adoption with a birthmother he found through a shopper, however, so we know it can be done.)

The problem with shoppers for adoption advertising is that people haven't been trained to look for that sort of advertising in them.

You may reach for a shopper if you want to buy or sell a car, but not if you're looking to make an adoption plan for a baby. In addition, these publications generally sit around the grocery store or gas station; unlike daily newspapers, they usually don't have news or feature stories, pictures or grocery-store or department-store advertising to encourage people to pick them up every day or every week.

(If you do choose to advertise in shoppers, forget the previous advice about not dressing up your ad and go for all the boxes, hearts and flowers you can get. You'll need the glitz to avoid getting lost in the shuffle of an all-ad publication.)

Measuring Success

The easy way to tell how your ad campaign is going is by seeing whether your toll-free number is ringing and you have been talking with birthmothers.

If, after a month or so in your chosen papers, things aren't going well, try a few different papers with costs-per-thousand almost as good. If after a couple of months the phone isn't ringing at all, ask your lawyer or homestudy social worker to evaluate the ad. There may be something about it, rather than your advertising plan, that is turning birthmothers off.

It's important to reach as many birthmothers as possible for your limited advertising dollars because unfortunately, birthmothers as a group are not the most reliable of people (although there are many wonderful exceptions). This is a very stressful moment in their lives, and they don't always do what they say they'll do, such as return your calls, call your lawyer, read your letter to birthmothers, meet you or (in the end) agree to allow you to rear their children.

In our 18 months, Pam and I "came close" with three birthmothers of those 49 we found before succeeding with a fourth. We trained ourselves not to get excited until we took that woman's child home from the hospital. And if we hadn't succeeded, we'd have been back in the advertising columns again -- not competing against you, but seeking to find a pregnant woman who liked us.

Keep your head up

All this sounds like a lot of work, and it is. But keep your head up -- women keep getting pregnant, so the readers for adoption classified ads keep changing. People eventually will dial your number, and someone will choose to let you raise her child. We'll look forward to seeing your e-mail birth announcement.

If I can be of help, please feel free to contact me at tompellfw@aol.com. Best of luck.