Welcome to our Social Workers Section

"My team spent hours with our IT department creating pages on our councils web site for people who might be interested in adoption or fostering. Very few people looked at them. Since having a listing with you we actually get some enquirers saying that they have seen us on the web!" - Team Manager.

See example of why we get so many visitors.

What about search engines ranking?

Do you doubt the value of the world wide web?

The Adoption and Fostering Information Line is now the most visited web site on adoption and fostering in the UK. Our visitors enjoy the content of the web site and are able to read and gather a lot of very useful information. In one week over 150,000 pages were seen. Many visitors stay for quite substantial amounts of time finding out all about adoption and the organisations they can contact to further their interest. You will find that many of our visitors are just the kind of potential applicants that recruitment workers want to make contact with.

In the last few months we have welcomed Nottingham City Council, Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council and East Sussex Council, Brighton and Hove Council and Family Care of Nottingham to our detailed listing service. We are confident that they will all reap the many benefits from being a part of this initiative.

If the organisation you work for does not have a detailed listing on this web site they are missing out on the very best opportunity to recruit more foster carers and adopters over the Internet. Two of the three councils whose adoption services were awarded Beacon status this year use our service - Essex and Medway. A London Borough's recruitment officer reported that since signing up they now receive more enquiries through the internet than anywhere else. 'Three applicants in our next preparation group came through your service, Thank you'. Voluntary adoption agencies benefit too. An agency that signed up wrote six weeks later 'we are very impressed with the response we have had so far' and 'although it is very early days with these referrals quite a number of them look very promising'. Can you claim the same success for any other recruitment initiatives?

Below is a survey of 600 first time visitors to our web site. As you can see the average length of their first visit is over 4 minutes. As page download times on our dedicated server tend to be quick this means that they have on average accessed around 9 pages of information on their first visit. Over 30% will visit our web site on at least two more occasions and those that return tend to spend much longer periods of time finding out about adoption.

The remaining pages in this section of our web site are intended to inform social work staff how they can take advantage of our service. They provide details of the services we provide to organisations working in this field. Social workers and managers who work every day with the pressures that resource shortfalls create often appreciate the assistance which we can provide regarding foster carer and adopter recruitment for their organisations. If you have any doubts that this service will work for you just speak to organisations like NCH, Kent, Essex or Surrey County Council. The London Boroughs of Redbridge, Wandsworth, Haringey or Hackney. Parents and Children Together or the Manchester Adoption Service. We are certain that they will leave you in no doubt about the effectiveness of our services.

As the organisation that first created a directory of adoption and fostering organisations on the web we have seen, and will continue to see, others follow our lead. However, our web site is the one most frequently referred to by search engines and is easily found by those interested in adoption or fostering. Put simply our adoption agency database is the one that counts.

Our database entry and other packages are designed to ensure that anyone living in the UK can find out about your organisation and how to make contact with you with the minimum of difficulty. These services allow people to express their interest whilst they are on-line without even the need to make a phone call. One big advantage is that they can do this at any time of day or night. Subscribing organisations simply gain a much bigger response from our visitors. Just ask them.