Linkmaker

[poppet31]

Looking for some advice for those who have used or are currently using Linkmaker (with a VA.) We were approved last week and started looking at profiles yesterday. Finding it all a bit overwhelming and have a few questions:

• did you look at all available profiles? When we filter for our age range there are over 300. It's a big backlog to look through. Managed about 40 profiles yesterday but it could honestly be a full time job.
• when registering interest did you send a general message or did you ask more specific questions about the child? Not sure what the etiquette is?
• any general hints or tips / experiences would be good! Our social worker is quite new to her role so is also finding her feet and is happy for us to manage our own enquiries. Thanks in advance!

[topcat2014]

Don't forget you can filter regions too. In our case, we also filtered whether there could be existing children.

Ethnicities help etc.

Having said that, our LA don't pay a full subscription, so we could not actually express an interest ourself direclty.

[Ted27]

you can't possibly look at 300+ profiles, you will get horribly confused.

I adopted before Linkmaker, but I'd agree with topcat about applying more filters - ethnicity is one, can you filter on single children or sibling groups etc.

Matching is very hard on the emotions. Good luck

[EightWellies]

300?! Wow. Agree with the others that you can't engage with that kind of number. I would think it's unlikely that a SW in Cornwall would be willing to travel to Inverness, when they could go for a more local option, so I'd only be looking up to a few hours drive away.

We found DD2 on Linkmaker. We were on there for around a month and had expressed interest in 3 or 4 wee ones in total. We just hit the express interest button, but also asked our SW to send a supporting message and our SW had put quite a bit of effort into our profile.

It is emotionally, particularly when photos are included. Go easy on yourself.

[poppet31]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I think we were being unrealistic thinking we could look at every profile on there! We stopped after reading about 30 and have actually started a few conversations already so you never know!