Getting the referral ready for publication
What happens once your referral reaches Be My Parent
Preparing for publication
Making corrections
Publishing the profile
Preparing for publication
Once you have made a referral, the profile of the child or sibling group will be checked and edited by experienced staff at Be My Parent, in consultation with a Child Placement Consultant with a social work background. This is to give the children the best opportunity to find a permanent family. You may be contacted by telephone to discuss any queries about the profile.
Making corrections
Once the Be My Parent team has completed the editing process, the edited profile will be faxed or emailed to you for approval by a set deadline (usually three working days for a first draft, and one working day for a second draft or more).
If you have referred to both the newspaper and online service, we may send you two different profiles to approve if the web profile is longer.
Any changes you wish to make by this deadline will be incorporated. Otherwise, we will assume that you are happy with the faxed or emailed profile as it stands, and publish it on the website or in the newspaper, accordingly.
Please fax back the edited profile with handwritten corrections, as this is easier for us than receiving a retyped profile. If you wish to email any amendments or comments, please ensure that these stand out sufficiently, to avoid their being overlooked. For example, you could use 'Track Changes' in Microsoft Word, highlight your changes, or make the font a different colour to the rest of the text.
Any changes will need to fit in with the word limit and the Be My Parent house style.
Please note that, for profiles on the website, you can make minor changes to the content at any point during its referral run by contacting us. This is not possible for profiles once they have been published in the newspaper and are 'stuck in print'. However, if booked in for more than one issue, we may be able to incorporate late changes into the next edition of the newspaper.
Publishing the profile
Once you have approved the profile (or not gotten back to us with any amendments by the deadline given), and there are no outstanding queries, the profile can be published.
If a web-only profile, it can be made live on the website straightaway. If a newspaper-only profile, it will need to be sent to the printers to go into the relevant month's issue of the paper. If a joint web and newspaper referral, the web profile will be made live approximately three weeks before it is published in the newspaper .
Last updated: 26 May 10
