Parent Profile Book...?

KateySue

Did any of you put together a parent profile book? You know, with a "dear birth mother" letter along with pictures and stories about your life. I'm assuming this is most common with agencies, but we are pursuing an independent adoption and were wondering if you have any tips on creating this book. We'd like for it to be creative, and somewhat scrap-booked looking, but we've yet to find a digital scrapbook program that we like well enough to use...most of them do not provide enough space to write more than a couple sentences on each page. We have made contact with a cmpany that maes becautiful books but they are very expensive and considering how many we will be making, it just isn't feasable to go the retailer route. 

 Any ideas, suggestions, examples? Thanks!

Dragonfly_Bride

Have you looked at scrapblog.com, yet? I don't know if it will meet your needs, but I know some gals here have used it. if you go to the site, you can do a search for "adoption" and see some examples, I think.

crystalpopcorn

Dragonfly_Bride:

Have you looked at scrapblog.com, yet? I don't know if it will meet your needs, but I know some gals here have used it. if you go to the site, you can do a search for "adoption" and see some examples, I think.

We used scrapblog.com and have gotten many, many compliments on our book.  I highly recommend it. Plus, it only costs $15 to have the books printed.

KateySue

Thanks! $15 per book? How many books did you print, if you don't mind me asking. We have unlimited resources with printers, paper, etc because my husband works at our church where this has all been made available...do you know if the scrapblog lets you print on your own?

 I will check it out ...

crystalpopcorn

KateySue:

Thanks! $15 per book? How many books did you print, if you don't mind me asking. We have unlimited resources with printers, paper, etc because my husband works at our church where this has all been made available...do you know if the scrapblog lets you print on your own?

 I will check it out ...

I printed four copies.  The agency needed three, and we wanted one for ourselves.  Yes, you can download print quality jpegs and print them yourself.  You have to pay for that though.  I'm not sure how much b/c I didn't go that route.  

Temp206787500007404

We used Picaboo for ours.

Jessie*J

We used Shutterfly for ours. They were running a sale the first time I used them. We only had to print 4 so far for one of our attorneys. For the other attorney I handmade 2 profiles and OMG lol, it was VERY time consuming and pretty pricey considering I had to print off a ton of pictures.

GL with finding one you really like : )

KateySue

I'm on scrapblog, trying to figure out how to create my book and it wants me to pay for every background, sticker, etc. Is there a way around this? The book alone is going to cost well over $100 for me to just simply put together...that doesn't include printing. Eesh!

Alicia_22

We used mixbook.com. It was the one I found with the best backgrounds, stickers, etc that were free. I liked scrapblog but I'm too indecisive to pay for the individual backgrounds & stickers! We bought one soft cover book, and took it to Office Max & had copies made ( our agency wanted the pages in clear page protectors and not an actual book. The book cost $30 I think and then the copies were $40 and we had 8 made. GL to you. I searched forever to decide which site I liked best! 

Jessie*J

KateySue:

I'm on scrapblog, trying to figure out how to create my book and it wants me to pay for every background, sticker, etc. Is there a way around this? The book alone is going to cost well over $100 for me to just simply put together...that doesn't include printing. Eesh!

That's why I didn't end up using it lol. All together our 4 books costs us $56 I believe. And our attorney LOVED them. (But I was working with free shipping ... see if you can find one running a special or an online coupon)!

Dragonfly_Bride

KateySue:

I'm on scrapblog, trying to figure out how to create my book and it wants me to pay for every background, sticker, etc. Is there a way around this? The book alone is going to cost well over $100 for me to just simply put together...that doesn't include printing. Eesh!

There are a lot of free stickers/elements. I believe there are two ways to get them - either sort by "least credits needed" or do a search on "free". You can also get  150 credits by just trying their "quickmix."

crystalpopcorn

Dragonfly_Bride:

KateySue:

I'm on scrapblog, trying to figure out how to create my book and it wants me to pay for every background, sticker, etc. Is there a way around this? The book alone is going to cost well over $100 for me to just simply put together...that doesn't include printing. Eesh!

There are a lot of free stickers/elements. I believe there are two ways to get them - either sort by "least credits needed" or do a search on "free". You can also get  150 credits by just trying their "quickmix."

Yes, exactly. I think I paid $10 for stickers and background.  To me, this was much more economical than buying shutterfly books at  $35 (estimate) a pop--even though Shutterfly frequently offers 20% discounts.  Just use as many free elements as you can.  Don't get me wrong, I love shutterfly books too.  I've made a few for other purposes.  However, I felt like the design freedom that scrapblog offers let me create a book that would stand out from the rest.  It seemed to pay off, as we were picked quickly.  I've never heard of that mix book site, but that would be worth looking into as well.  Just play around with all of your options and figure out which you like best.

One more thought--if you are planning to do your own advertising as part of a private adoption, having your profile online (scrapblog, shutterfly, whatever) would probably be a good idea.  Link to it from your personal website or blog.  Just an idea. 

amberfernandez

I used scrapblog.  They have pre-packaged backgrounds stickers etc, so I purchased one of those, and you can reuse all those backgrounds and elements over and over throughout the book.

I then paid about $5/page to download a "high quality" version of each page, then took the files to Kinko's and had them printed on good quality cardstock and bound.  We needed to provide our facilitator 15 copies, so the printing ended up being over $200.

I was a bit worried about the cost, but when we met with our birthmother, she said our profile really stood out, seemed very professional, was very different from all the others, and looked like we really wanted this because it looked like we put alot of time and hard work into our profile.

So yeah, it was pricey, but we're now matched with a birthmother after just 1 1/2 months of being active, so every penny was worth it!

Dr.Loretta

Ours was only required to be 2 pages, because we also do a profile video. Our agency has now expanded the option to do a 5-page profile.

I used scrapblog.com, and they turned out really nice. PM me if you want to see how they looked. I could also give you the suggestions our agency gave for what kind of information/pictures they suggesed.

There was plenty of room for putting in as much/little text as we wanted on scrapblog.

 

cjmorgan

Most of the ones I've seen only have a lo of words on the "dear birth mother" letter and maybe the last page, but they still are very nice. A lot of them I've seen are done by shutterfly. Weird thing is the family I like the most probably has the least amount of words out of all of the ones I've seen, but has tooons of photos.

WinWed

We did our own - as most at our agency do. They told us the costs are too high and the high end books don't seem to make a difference.

Jessie*J

Just remember that every potential birthparent is looking for something different. Do what you feel best represents you and everything will work out!

To us, spending alot of money on profiles for our own networking wasn't worth it. And what we made really stood out to our attorney. 

If we decide to move forward with our agency we'll be making another hand made profile and they create an online one. : )