Touching Base With Your Agency(ies)?
hi everyone. i think this has come up before, but can't remember exactly... when you were waiting, did you contact your agency(ies) to check in? if so, how often, and how did you handle it?
our back story - we had a failed match that, this week, will be 4 weeks ago. we have heard very little from our consultants or the agency since then. we want to check in and have a couple of times (once with each), and we were reassured that they are "doing everything they can." i don't have reason to doubt this, but i also think it's not a bad idea to check in every now and again to remind them we're out here in waiting land. i just wonder if there's a fine line between being a squeaky wheel and bothering them/seeming annoying.
thoughts? what did you do?
Re: Touching Base With Your Agency(ies)?
We wanted to be realistic about checking in, since we knew it could be months/years before we had a match. I suggested to our SW that we check in every 4-6 weeks, and she was fine with that. I checked in after the first 6 weeks and was told how many times our profile had been shown in the first month. After that we were called about a potential situation (that fell through) and a couple of weeks later got The Call. So we didn't check in again (obviously).
If I had to do it all over again, I'd check in maybe every other month. I'm sure they're acutely aware you're waiting, and when a match happens they'll let you know.
We waited for about 14 months total and had 4 failed matches. At first, I would email to check in about every 2 months or so. Our first match happened when we had only been waiting for about 6 months and after that one failed, I checked in at least once a month. I need to hear something from our CW even if it was that nothing was happening (which is what it usually was since if something was going on, they would have let me know!). My CW's (our first one left after a year so we had a new one for the last 2 months) both knew I would be emailing and it didn't seem to bother them. I joked about being the "irritating" client who emailed all the time at our last post placement visit a few weeks ago and she said it wasn't a problem at all! Honestly, it's their job to keep us informed and support us during the process and I had to remind myself all the time that we were paying them for a service so we should be able to check-in whenever we felt that we needed to.