AdopTalk

OK, great. We have some agreement that things are NOT as they should be...what do we do about it?

I have some very concrete suggestions.

I. EXPOSURE. The way to use the Internet is to establish exposure. You want anyone who logs on and enters the words "adoption" or "birthparent" or "birthmother" or "adoptee" etc. to find you.

This is currently NOT the case. Neither the AAC, nor BN, nor CUB come up anywhere the top of any adoption search. In fact, unless one knows the exact name or URL for these sites, you might as well forget about it. The Internet is not going to increase your membership - or help anyone - if you aren’t being found. There are zillions of websites and you just a needle in a HUGE haystack.

To make your presence known on the Internet, costs some bucks. Not just in creating and maintaining a website. We need to PAY search engines like Google to get our website to come up when anyone types in our key words. We need to put our money where our mouth and heart is. We need to dig into our pockets and get this ball rolling until we develop membership bases that will hopefully keep it rolling.

To some extent, we have already blown it. Adoption.com beat us to the punch in a very major way. All roads currently lead to them. They have lots of sponsorship. THEY are our new nemesis, not the NCFA! And, as I said, it will take money to fight back. When I say all roads lead to them, I mean that quite literally. You cannot do a search for anything with the word “adoption” in it that does not lead to you to a page of their site. You can get there by typing in adoption.com; .org. or .net; or by using any of the keywords mentioned. They have cornered the market on adoption on the web. We COULD join them (yuck!).…We could lie down and die and just give up.….or, we could rally the troops and make our UNIQUE presence known. I suggest we do the later and here's how.

II. A UNIQUE NICHE. We need to establish ourselves in a big way by spending dollars to have our site appear at the top of search lists, but we need to first cerate a CLEAR and UNIQUE approach. We are NOT adoption.com. We do NOT help match couples and expectant moms. So what are we? What do we call ourselves?

I suggest: ADOPTION KINSHIP NETWORK. Other suggestions welcomed. I envision a website that links all adoption reform and search sites, orgs, etc. Our common goals are those stated at the top of this page. Simple ones that all of us agree upon - despite the differences of a "pure" bill vs. accepting a veto; birthmothers vs. adoptee, etc. Each group maintains its own integrity. But all support one central place to draw traffic to our individual web sites. We are either going to all succeed or all go down together, as we have been doing.

We need to ACT and not get bogged down in the in-fighting that has kept the AAC from ever being the umbrella organization Kate Burke envisioned it decades ago when I was on the board.

All grassroots movements have their schisms and factions: Civil Rights had the black panthers and the Martin Luther King followers – extremely different in their style sand methodology. Yet they were somehow all part of working toward the same goal – civil rights.
Feminists too have more factions that one can count. But they have a central focus that you can find very easily when doing an internet search: NOW!

By pooling some financial resources together we can get the exposure we need without bankrupting each individual small group.