Do I need an Adoption Profile Video?

99% of hopeful adoptive families that reach out to me are making this one mistake that are preventing them from matching their adoption. And when we correct that one mistake, the majority of them go on to match their adoption in less than one year. I'm an adoption profile expert who has helped over 1,000 families bring home their babies through adoption over the last eight years, and changing this one critical thing in their profiles has made all the difference. 

This one mistake is not having an adoption profile video. 

Over the last eight years, I've spent over 3,000 hours talking with expectant families to get a better understanding of why they pick certain families and why they don't pick others when they're looking at adoption profiles. And the biggest thing they tell me is that it's got to be easy to get to know someone. When you ask them “How is it easier for you to get to know someone”, they often point back to understanding someone a bit better when they can hear the voice and see them in action versus just reading about them or seeing about their life on social media. 

Now, the idea of creating an adoption profile video is one that often scares most of us. I can tell you from my own experience in creating my adoption profile video, that we were so nervous. We didn't want to say the wrong thing. We wanted to make sure we set up exactly right. We wanted to have the right amount of light coming on our faces. All the things. It felt so overwhelming, and it made me feel nervous. If I'm being really honest, creating these videos still makes me pretty nervous. Even when I have a computer screen over here with all of my notes to make me feel organized, you can still feel pretty nervous. 

But I have a three-step process that I've created for my clients and use in my process to help keep those nerves at bay as much as possible that will help you create an adoption profile video to match your adoption faster. 

This three-step process is going to cover how to make your profile video. But when it comes to understanding what to put inside that profile video that requires its own special training. I have a free training coming up where I will cover exactly that! In the training, I will cover the three things that you need to have in your adoption profile video to bring home your baby in 2024. If you'd like to join us for this free live training where you can ask me any questions that you want about your adoption journey or adoption profiles, you can join us live!  Just head on over to myadoption coach.com/training to grab your seats. 

Details of the 3-Step Process

Step One

The very first thing that you need to do is to create a video outline. It is way easier to get your adoption profile correct the first time if you understand where you are headed. With my one-to-one clients, we use something called the adoption profile clarity builder system. This allows us to get clear about the specific things that you want to share with an expectant family about your family. Those become the core themes that we use as stories to bring to life within your profile. Using those themes to form your outline is critical because it allows us to be organized with the way we share your story. So that makes it easier for someone to get to know you. So when I'm writing someone's profile video outline for them, I'm using those themes as the content blocks that we're going to use to create the story of their profile video.

Step Two

The second step to making an amazing adoption profile video is setting the scene. Now I know this may sound silly, but you want to be intentional so that you can move forward and create your video quickly. If you're going to tell a story about how you like to cook in the kitchen together, then you want to make sure that you have everything set up so that you can go and film a section of your video specifically about your cooking in the kitchen. Or if you'd like to travel, maybe you're going to bring in old footage from your phone of you traveling as a family. Maybe you're going to bring in snapshots, things of that nature, but you're going to specifically write out an outline around the particular idea of travel. 

You want to make sure that you're setting up every little section of the video intentionally so that you can sit down and do this efficiently. Maybe you're going to sit there at the very beginning of the video and introduce yourself directly to the camera. You're going to make sure that you're setting yourself up with good lighting, where it's easy to see you. You want to make sure that there's no noise and distractions in the background so that it's easy for someone to hear you. Then you want to transition over to the kitchen to have your cooking scene. You're going to have your ingredients prepped, and you're going to take some video footage of you chopping things or putting things into the pot or making a pie. Whatever it might be that you're telling the story around. You want to make sure that what I call the see and say matches. What you're saying from an audio perspective or a written perspective matches what you're seeing on the screen. It is essential that the see and say match because that helps build trust with your audience. It helps to ensure that your audience knows what you're talking about. 

I have had countless expectant parents tell me that they felt a real connection with the hopeful adoptive family’s profile because they saw them doing the things they were talking about. An expectant mother told me once that she was reading this couple’s profile book and she came across a section where they were talking about how they’re intentional with family time. That was just never something she had growing up so it didn’t seem real to her that somebody would do that. But she saw them doing that in their profile video. She saw them having a family dinner, and spending quality time together.

She said that that detail mattered to her because she knew that it wasn't staged. They had intentionally set up their phone on a tripod and just captured a few minutes of them having dinner. And then they use that in combination with a voiceover where they talked about how family dinner was really important to them, how they made sure no matter how many activities were going on in their week, that they sat down three to four times a week and had dinner together as a family and talked about their day. That was something that she latched on to in that video and said that was something that she wanted her child to experience. That was one of the key reasons why she picked that particular hopeful adoptive family. 

Step Three

The next thing that you have to do to create your video is hit the record button. Now I know this is the step in the process that makes us butterflies kick in. But if you have an outline, and if you have set yourself up to have all the content and made it easy for you to film, it makes it easier to hit record. No one's going to see the pieces and parts where you mess up. You just choose the best take and maybe upload it to a video editor that can put everything together for you. That's what ultimately makes creating an adoption profile video so much easier. 

If you need to know exactly what needs to go inside that video so that you know that you're getting it right and making the best use of your time, you want to make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel, because that's exactly what I'm going to be covering in next week's video. Or you can show up live to the training and ask me any questions you have. Remember, friend, anything is possible with the right plan and support. I'm here with you every single step of the way.