A caution about posting to the BPN website

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 BPN or Parents of Teens subscriber

Note: Parents who subscribe to BPN can post a review of their child's tutor. See Posting a review of a tutor below. These reviews will appear in the newsletter, and will eventually be archived to the BPN website in the "Reviews from Parents" section.

Posting to the BPN website

Tutors can use the Tutor Posting Form to post a message to the BPN website about your tutoring. You do not need to be a BPN subscriber in order to post. We will review your message to make sure it meets our policy, and if it does, we'll put it on the BPN website. This can take us as long as 3-4 weeks.

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.

2. You must live locally in the SF Bay Area. 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. 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 2010, the BPN website was receiving 50,000 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 above about 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

Tutors who subscribe to BPN and/or Parents of Teens may post a brief announcement about their availability per the following instructions.

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 6,475 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 31,655 local parents of young children and babies. Click here for the Announcements posting form.

Announcements posted to any of the 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 in the SF Bay Area 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.

Posting a review of a tutor

• Teens newsletter in the section "Respond to a Previous Question"; scroll to the end and choose "Tutor Review".
• Schools, Preschools & Camps under "Parent Review of a School, Camp, or Tutor".

Parent subscribers can also post a review in response to another parent's request for tutors in the Teens, Recommendations, or Schools newsletters. These reviews are also archived to the BPN website.