5 Essential Steps To Finding the Best Egg Donor

Finding the right egg donor can be the most important decision you’ll ever make.  Below are the top five tips we offer in helping you find the best egg donor.

1. Become a Registered User

Starting a family is a big decision, and choosing the right egg donor is important. The first step to finding the best egg donor is to register with the Fairfax EggBank to access our free and comprehensive donor database. Unregistered users can access donor profiles, but will only have a limited view. As a registered user, you’ll instantly be able to view particular details about a donor, including her:

• Childhood photos,
• Adulthood photos (upon completion of an online confidentiality agreement form),
• Summary profile,
• Medical profile,
• Personal profile,
• Donor essay, and
• Audio interview.

2. Prioritize Your Search Criteria

To find the best egg donor, you probably have specific criteria in mind. In addition to being able to choose your child’s donor based on filtering for race, hair color, eye color, height, skin tone, blood type, Rh factor, level of genetic testing, and religion, you may want your donor to have certain academic, musical or athletic accomplishments under her belt. Our donor database makes it easy to find what you’re looking for.

Our one tip is to deeply evaluate your criteria, and see where you might be flexible in some areas. Perhaps, for instance, the donor’s height isn’t as big of a deal as long as she hits all the other marks. Or, maybe even if you’re looking for a 100% Asian donor, you might be open to a bi-racial Asian donor. If you’re too specific, you will inevitably narrow the selection from which to choose. As a consequence, you might overlook a donor who is a great candidate. Therefore, we recommend you broaden your search criteria, and then narrow in.

3. Check the Website Often

The number of egg donors we have available continue to climb as we find new opportunities and markets to recruit donors. As such, our donor database constantly changes as we add new donors as well as returning donors who completed another egg donation cycle. We encourage you to visit our donor database often so you can discover new donors introduced to the site. As a registered user, a functionality we have built in is for you to easily distinguish new donors that we’ve added since you’ve last visited the site. This way, you’ll know which donors you haven’t checked out yet.

4. Contact Us as Soon as You Find a Donor You Like

We operate on a first-come, first-served basis when a recipient communicates interest in a specific donor. Thousands of recipients check our website out daily, and we receive hundreds of emails and calls from recipients in any given week.

If you see a donor you like, don’t ruminate over her for a few days. Contact us immediately so that we can put her cohort on hold. Too often, we’ve had aspiring recipients reach out to us only after noticing a donor they were interested in is no longer listed on the website. The disappointment they feel when they realize the donor no longer has available cohorts is unfortunate. (Though they might luck out if the donor returns for another cycle and/or another recipient decides to release a cohort she reserved).

By contacting us immediately, you’ll increase your chances of the donor having cohorts available. If you’re an established patient at an IVF clinic partner of Fairfax EggBank, you’ll even be able to place a cohort on hold for two business days. You don’t have to pay anything to hold a donor cohort. This hold will give you the ability to deliberate whether you want to move forward with a donor. If you decide you don’t want to move forward with the donor, we’ll simply release the hold. You’ll have the liberty to hold another donor’s available cohort if you wish.

5. Contact Us Even if You Don’t See Any Donors You Like

You may not find the best egg donor right away. Don’t get discouraged. Once you initiate contact with us, we’ll assign a dedicated Client Relations coordinator to you. This coordinator’s mission is to help you find the perfect egg donor and to simplify the process to secure and ship her donor eggs to your clinic. Let your Fairfax EggBank coordinator know what your needs are and what you’re looking for in a donor. You may wish even to send the coordinator a picture of yourself so that the coordinator can search for a donor with similar features to you. The coordinator has a strong knowledge of our donors and might be able to flag an ideal donor that you might have initially overlooked or was recently added to the donor database.

By following these tips, you should be able to increase your chances of finding the best egg donor. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us. We look forward to helping you build your family.