Connecting the Dots: How Might We Create a Win-Win with Adoption Education?

For the last 16 months, I have been working with adoptees and birth mothers who are looking to change the narrative around adoption. Doing right by this community has had very high stakes for me because I myself am part of it in that I am an adoptee. I have an unfair advantage in covering this community because this community was more welcoming to me not only because of my being an adoptee, but also because I came into it being curious about the experience of birth mothers, who society often forgets are even there. Coming into the Startup Sprint class at the beginning of the semester, I was sitting on a mountain of research that I knew was important to put out into the world, but I didn’t know how to optimize in terms of delivery. Throughout this semester I have pivoted and honed my approaches based on user feedback, which has helped me to think outside the box in terms of getting my community’s needs met in creative ways that create win-win scenarios for subgroups within the adoption community that are oftentimes at odds with each other.

The starting point I came into this semester with was almost misleading in terms of what I could hope for with this project. I launched the Voices of Adoption TikTok channel last May, which was never supposed to be part of my long-term plan. The first post I created had adoptees talking about the argument that pro-lifers use, that we don’t need abortion because there’s adoption. I created this in response to the Dobb’s Opinion leak bringing this front-and-center. I wanted to add some journalistic legitimacy behind these adoptees’ voices, so it was originally supposed to be part of NYCity News Service’s TikTok channel, until at the last-minute I was asked to include their names, which I had promised participants from the beginning would and it not do, which was the point of this being an audio-only video for TikTok.

Even being on TikTok at all, was just meant to beta test what I thought was going to later become a longer video of these answers with creative visuals overlaying it. This would serve as an educational tool that people in the community could send to others, as opposed to always having to answer themselves. This would save them some emotional bandwidth and also help to complicate the narrative by including many voices and experiences. To honor my community’s wishes for anonymity, I pivoted and created a channel to house this project, which unexpectedly generated a powerful response online and the video going viral within a day. Currently this video has 142.2k views.

So I decided to lean into this, having very little prior experience with the app, letting the results guide my work. When it came to monetization, however, I learned that I was still a ways off from being able to make money off of TikTok to make this a self-sustaining endeavor. Jeremy Caplan, our professor, encouraged me to start a separate project for our class, but what could I start that could potentially make money? He recommended I find a way to find new avenues for the content I was already creating, such as repurposing the audio to make a mini podcast series. After bringing this idea up with a producer I worked with at StoryCorps for my internship, he said that without a longer episode, there will be less room for a potential ad to be placed.

This is where the How Might We questions that I developed for my Landscape Analysis really helped. It helped me evaluate problems my community was dealing with in a way that maybe they wouldn’t know how to articulate or know were even potentially solvable. Since any business venture worth its salt is essentially providing a solution to a problem someone is dealing with, and there is already a plethora of information about adoption out there, I was inspired to think beyond information needs. Here are some of the How Might We questions I came up with that led to the creation of my project for this class.

• How might we get more accurate and nuanced adoption stories into the mainstream media, in a way that the community feels like they have more agency?
• How might we keep community members, new and old, in-the-know about changing adoption practices and laws?

One thing that has been really difficult about this process is selling my ideas and projects to an audience that doesn’t understand my community. The work we did around presentation curation taught me how to take several different approaches to streamlining this information and distilling it down to information that would grab the attention of viewers the most, utilizing data that surprises and also helps people empathize with my community and converts them from adoption-curious to adoption reform advocates. So the reason that having more accurate and nuanced adoption stories into the mainstream media is so important, is so that this mission can be legitimized more. Historically the media landscape has portrayed adoption in ways that perpetuate harmful myths.

One of those myths is that adoptees who were taken at birth have the least amount of mental health consequences, when that is far from the truth. The reality is that when taken at birth, adoptees suffer maternal separation trauma, meaning, it has a neurobiological impact on brain development and interrupts a child’s ability to develop trust in others. This often leads to mental health problems down the road. Adoptees have higher rates of suicide, personality disorders, attachment disorders and mood disorders. If I were to try to show all of this information in a slide, the volume of information would drown out the impact. But if I add one slide that highlights a very disturbing piece of data, that packs more of a punch.

The second-half of that How Might We statement, focused on giving agency back to the community member who is sharing their story. One reason I had thought of this, was something that adoptee TikToker @sajotheadopteehag told me about what had happened to her when she was interviewed by USA Today. She said that after their interview, their fact-checkers used ignorant methods to get proof that she was in fact adopted. An example she gave was they were asking for her birth certificate to prove this, even though, had the fact-checkers done their research, they would know that our birth certificates as adoptees don’t have anything on them that shows we are adopted.

Another way that traditional journalism falls short in covering adoption, is its requirement for most if not all sources to go on the record. Unless someone is a witness to a crime, it is difficult to convince editors to allow a source to share their story anonymously, which was the trouble I had with the NYCity News Service. In a survey with the adoptees I did my first TikTok post with, the top two reasons they listed anonymity was important to them was they were concerned how their being honest with their experiences with adoption would impact their relationships, most notably their adoptive parents and shame that was placed on them when they placed their child for adoption.

I have experienced this first-hand, where pro-life trolls were coming onto my page asking ignorant and off-putting questions such as, “well wouldn’t you rather be aborted?” At the same time, I have also noticed adoptive parents entering into adoptee TikTok be completely shocked at what they stumble into, and get defensive over their role as adoptive parents and in doing so, try to re-center the conversation about them instead of the adoptees. This is where the media also falls short, in that it tends to center adoptive parent voices rather than birth mothers and adoptees, who are the most adversely affected by the adoption process. What’s tricky about this, is that there are some people who are adoptive parents and who are curious about adoption who are asking questions and staying present because they want to learn and do right by their kids or think through adoption fully before deciding to adopt. Unfortunately, because the other parents have given adoptive parents a bad rap on TikTok, this platform has become a less-than welcoming space for newcomers who haven’t yet gotten a baseline of knowledge about harmful adoption practices and systems and the inherent mental health impacts.

While I have done my best to be open and non-judgemental to these questions, some adoptees in the comments have not been so. For example, to the adoptive parent in the comment above, it was suggested in a reply by an adoptee that his children go to counseling. After he thanked that person for the suggestion, they quipped that it “says a lot” about him as an adoptive parent that they weren’t already in counseling.

@Alexandertheeh is an adoptive parent who has said in a comment to my first post, that,

“This app has been more insightful than the 20 hours of classes required per year for my county.”

So it shows that there is a market for adoptive parents to learn from adoptees. But not only can TikTok be a rude awakening for adoptive parents that risks scaring them away, it costs adoptees and birth mothers on TikTok emotional labor that they’re not getting paid for. I also wanted to find a way to take some of the burden off of this community and provide a community-sourced and journalist-vetted information resource hub for the TikTok community to redirect adoptive parents and adoption-curious people to.

So, I created the Voices of Adoption Substack newsletter. I thought Substack would be a good option because it can serve as a public website with different pages that anyone can visit without having to be a subscriber, as well as a private newsletter with various kinds of information about adoption being delivered every couple of weeks. With Substack’s new Chat feature and the places I could allow for comments, I also felt like it would be a good place for respectful conversation amongst subscribers to get their questions answered. And this way, their questions are in a place where they might inadvertently trigger someone who might be on TikTok while seeking comfort from the community while having a trauma response.

The What

This newsletter has now become part of the Voices of Adoption multimedia project, which busts myths around adoption to galvanize social and legislative change, and the newsletter is the only newsletter that aims to educate adoptive parents and others that puts adoptees and birth mothers at the center. Changing the public narrative around adoption I realized needed to be the first step because I myself entered into this program completely in the fog, that is, believing in most of the commonly-held beliefs about adoption that as it turns out, just weren’t true. Once I started to learn more about the mental health impacts, I realized I could trace back a lot of my own mental health problems to maternal separation trauma, as I was adopted at six months old. While there are adoption-competent therapists out there who are uniquely equipped to take this on, how does one even know to search for an adoption-competent therapist, if they don’t know that adoption is a traumatic event? I realized there were endless questions like this, so the focus of this project first and foremost needed to be about education.

Jeremy said that the first few issues don’t generate a lot of traffic, so it’s best to create shorter articles in the beginning that give a glimpse of what is to come. So I created a welcome article that I could then forward to every new subscriber after they sign up. It included an introduction as to who I am, the mission statement of the Substack, what future articles could look like and also ways to get involved with Voices of Adoption. There is also a separate article about the subscriber chat, which explains what it is and how to use it through the Substack app. I also noticed that there was a way to import Medium posts into Substack, so I imported my first Medium article from the first semester.

The About page was a description of the Voices of Adoption multi-platform project as a whole and what this Substack was for specifically. I wanted to encourage curiosity and questions so I described this Substack as a judgment-free zone and also made it clear that people could reach out to me with any questions by responding to a newsletter email and I will see the email and get back to them. I also encouraged them to connect through the subscriber chat so that they could get their questions answered in real-time and talk about these things with other community members as well.

It was suggested to me by Jeremy that I could repurpose the audio collages I was making to create a mini podcast. I liked this idea because the way I had to add video on TikTok really lowered the quality of the audio and this was an opportunity to upload a cleaner version of it. Substack has a built-in feature that allows one to add a podcast so I added that as another page to the newsletter.

I wanted to create as many avenues as possible for this to be co-created with the community, with me acting as the editor, so I created a Curated Resources page, which so far includes two Padlets: one titled “Adoption Reform Resources” and the other titled “Social Media Accounts to Follow.” I added a number of initial pages to have a starting place with some solid resources already for people. I also included the Downloadable PDF Information Packet I had on my Linktree for TikTok already, with a prompt to send this to anyone who is adoption-curious.

Adoption reform has a lot of words that are important to many community members, such as alternatives for the term birth mother, and social media tends to use a lot of acronyms. For example, today I just learned that “HAP” means “hopeful adoptive parent.” So I thought it would be helpful to have a “Terms to Know” section. I started off this page by adding terms to know that were specific to the article I wrote on National Adoption Month.

Feedback Loops

Every aspect of the Voices of Adoption project is done in response to things I’ve learned from the community and in collaboration with them. And in order to make this a community-sourced newsletter, it was imperative to me that this Substack included many avenues to keep the feedback loop going as well as opportunities for people to directly contribute. On the Curated Resources and Terms to Know pages, I added a prompt at the bottom asking if something was missing, incorrect or if they had a suggestion, with a comment box underneath it. Having avenues to be held accountable by my community I have found helps me serve my community best and builds trust. I also included on these pages, as well as the Get Involved page, I included ways to share the pages. For the articles themselves, people would be able to like, comment, share or save them.

I also included a Get Involved page that lives on the Substack main page alongside the other pages. This included a Calendly link to sign up for a recording for the Voices of Adoption TikTok and Instagram Channels, which has with it some poll questions, an opportunity for them to decide ahead of time what prompt they would like to answer and a request for consent to record. I also included a different Calendly link for Press to set up a consultation with me, where I could help them learn about how to ethically report on and/or fact-check adoption stories; and also an offer to help connect them with viable sources.

I also created a new callout, which had the same information needs and demographics questions but was also specific to learning more about my community’s product habits, employing Design Thinking tools. I asked people to fill this form out, since the information gathered there will help me to make the Substack better for those who are using it. Below that I included the on-going callout form I’ve had since May, which is an opportunity for people to join a Brainstorm Session (a.k.a. Listening Post). I used this form instead of the above one, since it still gathers information needs and demographics information, but is asking a lot less questions. I also linked to the Curated Resources page and described what Padlet is and how they could help by contributing any resources they would recommend to others there.

The Relationship Between TikTok and Substack

While shopping this idea around to my community I realized that the TikTok could be used for high-level engagement and a starting point of education. But since adoption is such a complex, nuanced topic, three-minute videos, which is the maximum length that TikTok will allow, is at-best very limiting and at-worst, potentially harmful. Without additional context to some of the more sensitive topics, the project runs the risk of becoming part of the problem by over-simplifying difficult issues in order to meet the time limit.

This is where the newsletter comes in. At the end of each video I could point people to the Substack to learn more about what was touched on in the video. This optimizes the TikTok channel in that it serves three purposes: education, engagement and advertising.

So for my first article I did a deep dive into the origins of National Adoption Month and how it’s evolved, which basically had everything I knew I wouldn’t have time to in the two explainer videos (National Adoption Month Explained, part 1 and National Adoption Month Explained, part 2) I created.

Revenue

With this natural connection between the two platforms, I have already managed to generate some revenue.

TikTok allows for Creators to make money through a variety of ways and one of them is TikTok Live. TikTok is selective with who it offers the Live feature to. They base it on the number of followers the creator has and quality of their content. Thankfully after my first post, this feature was turned on for me. During a live, viewers can offer gifts to people who are live, whether they are the host or a guest. Coins are TikTok’s currency, which become diamonds in the creator’s ledger. Viewers can either gift coins themselves or buy gifts with these coins, such as roses, which ultimately still equate to currency and vary in value.

During a spontaneous live event I hosted on November 17th, @me_mikelee (who is adoption-curious and had a question I answered) gave me one coin and @bahalto (who went live as a guest with me) gave me six coins.

This funneled directly into the Substack as after I talked a bit about it during the event, @bahalto went to look it up right away, said that it was exactly what the community needed, and signed up for a yearly subscription right then and there.

This also allows for more repurposing of content. For example, I created a podcast page that has just the audio from the first collage video. In addition, I am doing a series of Live events on TikTok that aren’t available on the platform after the fact. But if I transcribe the AMA and screen record the video, subscribers can get access to this.

Subscription

One reason using Substack was so appealing to me, was that it has a built-in feature to generate revenue, by turning on a feature that would charge for the subscription. The features that the community might find most helpful in a punch — the Curated resources page, Terms to Know, Podcast and Get Involved pages — are free and available to the public without a subscription. A free subscription will give someone access to all articles created from the date of them signing up. For $50 a year, or $5 a month, the paid subscription will give them access to all archived articles as well as the Subscriber chat feature which Substack recently launched.

Currently I have 26 subscribers, which includes 14 at the paid level, which should be noted that 13 of those paid subscribers are comped subscriptions. Those comps were given to key community collaborators and professors in a request for them to test it out.

I only very recently launched the Substack on TikTok, as a call-to-action at the end of the second video on National Adoption Month. From there I’ve gotten two new free subscribers and a promise from a TikTok follower to pay for it once she gets her next paycheck. I offered her a comped subscription instead, since I still feel as though this is in a bit of a beta phase.

Creating the Win-Win

The Chat feature inspired a new idea that I would like to take on in the new year. I was trying to figure out how to address these two questions:

• How might we offer ways for adoptees and birth mother influencers to be paid for their emotional labor when dealing with uneducated adoptive parents and reporters.
• How might we provide a safe space for those who are adoption-curious to ask questions freely, without feeling judged?

What I realized was that the subscriber Chat could answer both of them. I have been hosting brainstorm sessions with the community since last March, which has in a way, become almost a collective of sorts. I thought to myself, what if this became more official?

So moving forward I am looking to create a collective of like-minded adoptees and birth mothers who feel equipped to answer questions from adoptive parents and adoption-curious subscribers. Here, we could have this group get onto the Chat specifically to be on-call to answer their questions without feeling judged. Since they are now in a way working for the project, they would have free access to the newsletter, while those who have the questions they need answered would be paying for it. Then the revenue generated by the paid subscriptions would be distributed to those adoptees and birth parents who have been present in the chat, proportional to the amount of time spent doing this. This allows for adoptees and birth mothers to get paid for their emotional labor and adoptive parents to get their questions answered in a non-judgemental way at the same time.

I would also like for this same collective to have more active participation in what content the newsletter would house. There would be the opportunity to vote on topics covered, write guest pieces, interview other experts and more — where I would serve as the editor — continuing to add the journalistic integrity that this space needs.

Without the Lean Canvas to create a roadmap for me to develop this channel and the How Might We questions, I would have never gotten to this point in my thinking about how to serve my community. I had low expectations for Substack at the outset, mostly because it was so unfamiliar to me, but it has now become an integral part of serving my community.