The Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange (PAE) helps case workers who represent children in state custody by recommending prospective families for adoption. We describe PAE's operational challenges using case worker surveys and analyze child outcomes through a regression analysis of data collected over multiple years. A match recommendation spreadsheet tool implemented by PAE incorporates insights from this analysis and allows PAE managers to better utilize available information. Using a discrete-event simulation of PAE, we justify the value of a statewide adoption network and demonstrate the importance of better information about family preferences for increasing the percentage of children who are successfully adopted. Finally, we detail a series of simple improvements that PAE achieved through collecting more valuable information and aligning incentives for families to provide useful preference information.Key words : community OR; public service; matching; market design According to the most recent report of the Children's Bureau of the US Department of Health and Human Services (2014), approximately 397,000 children in the United States are living in the foster care system, with 102,000 of them waiting for adoptive placement. In 2012, while 50,000 children were successfully adopted from foster care, approximately 23,000 were discharged due to emancipation as they reached the age of 18 without receiving a permanent home. As cataloged by Howard and Brazin (2011), numerous studies have shown that children who spend significant time in foster care or "age out" of foster care without finding a permanent family suffer from alarming levels of unemployment, homelessness, early parenthood, and incarceration. For example, Reilly (2003) reports that 41% of respondents between the ages of 18 and 25 who had aged out of the foster care system have spent time in jail.