Posting an announcement about your tutoring service

1. Post to the BPN website, where your message will remain for one year
2. Post to the weekly email newsletter if you are a subscriber

Please read the following information about posting a message about your tutoring business.

Posting to the BPN website

Please read the following before posting to the BPN website:

1. You must be an individual who tutors. We do not post tutor announcements from businesses to our website. If we can't tell whether you're an individual or a business, we'll assume you're a business and we won't accept your message. (You may, however, post about your business to one of the newsletters if you are a subscriber. Instructions are below.)

2. You must live locally; i.e., within "commuting distance" of Berkeley, California. We do not accept announcements from tutors who live elsewhere or tutor over the phone or via the internet. If we can't tell from your posting that you live locally (a local phone number or a mention about your area), we'll assume you do not live locally and we won't post your message.

3. Only academic subjects are accepted such as math, sciences, languages, reading, and study skills. We do not accept tutor announcements for music classes, art classes, sports, etc. (You may, however, post about these to one of the newsletters if you are a subscriber. Instructions are below.) If you tutor more than one subject, you may post multiple times.

4. Your announcement will appear on a public website. The BPN website is publicly available to anyone with an Internet connection. As of Fall 2007, the BPN website was receiving more than 150,000 visits a day, and BPN has a fairly high google ranking for many topics. Please be aware of the potential broad exposure of your message.

5. Your email address will appear on a public website, which means it is available to anyone on the internet, including unscrupulous people. Please read A caution about posting to the BPN website below for examples of how tutors' email addresses have been mis-used. We will "spam-proof" the email address you give us before we put it on our website (i.e., "user@email.com" will be displayed as "user[at]email.com"). This makes it less likely that it will be harvested from our website by robots for use by spammers. However, there is no guarantee that your email address won't be mis-used. Note: we can't spam-proof any email addresses that you type into the body of your message, only the one that you entered in the "email" box on the form.

6. Your phone number, if you provide it, will appear on a public website. Phone number is optional. If you include it, be aware it will be available to anyone on the internet, including unscrupulous people. You are welcome to include a URL if you have a website.

7. Your announcement will be on our website for one year. We remove tutor postings from our website that are older than one year.

8. Our website is updated infrequently by a volunteer parent. Although we will do our best to get your post on to our website within a couple of weeks, please be aware that it may take longer than this. We are not able to make changes to your posting if your availability changes. Therefore, please do not include any information in your message that may need to be updated within the next year, such as your rates, your hours, or your current availability. If you need to make a change, it's best to post a new announcement and wait for the older one to expire.

9. Another good place to post about your availability is craigslist.org

Posting to one of the BPN newsletters

If you subscribe to Parents of Teens, you can post an announcement about your service to the email newsletter under "Announcements: Classes and Other Services for Teens". This newsletter is mailed each week to 3,776 local parents of teens and pre-teens. Click here for the Teens posting form.

If you are a BPN subscriber, you can post a message to the Announcements newsletter under "Kids' Classes & Groups". This newsletter is mailed weekly to 21,413 local parents of young children and babies. Click here for the Announcements posting form.

Announcements posted to BPN newsletters must conform to the BPN policy about Advertising and Commercial Use. These announcements are NOT archived to the BPN website.

You can subscribe to BPN and/or Parents of Teens if you live "within commuting distance" of Berkeley, California and you are able to participate in discussions about children or teens. This means that you are either raising children yourself, or you have regular contact with them because of your work. See Who can join the list? for more information about subscribing to Teens and/or BPN. The forms to subscribe are here.

A caution about posting to the BPN website

Here are two examples that tutors have told us about (and we welcome your emails telling us about other problems):

• Scam targeted toward tutors As recently as Feb 25, 2008. Emails from someone claiming to be interested in hiring a tutor for a child who does not live in the Bay Area but will be visiting soon. They say that they found your email address "on the website". Click the link above for details and examples of the scam emails.

• Email from tutoring services looking to hire tutors. In October 2007, a tutor who had posted on the BPN website told us that she was subsequently contacted by someone named Peter Ackerson who wants to hire tutors for his online tutoring service. BPN does not participate in or encourage online tutoring services, and we do not accept postings from any tutors other than individuals who live locally. However, we cannot prevent businesses from contacting you using the information they found on our website.