Good luck with this! You probably have a lot of contacts via your job already? Could you email these professionals and the parents and let them know about the forum? If you don't have email addresses on file, you should start collecting them.

Add the url and a brief description of the forum to all of your outgoing correspondence and all of your emails.

Add the url to your/your company's business cards.

Flatter and gather - contact several of these professionals and ask them to mod/admin/make a guest appearance in certain sections of the forum.

Do you have a waiting room or general gathering place of some kind? Make a few cards or signs announcing the forum for the room.

Are there any similar forums already on the web? Register and make a few intelligent, interesting comments

Indeed, iconomy, I have 500 contacts or so. I emailed them. 300 email addresses worked, about 50 people joined the Forum, LESS THAN FIVE OF THEM FRIGGING POST.

URL is going on the business cards, and is everybody's sig here at work.

Flatter and gather is a good idea and I'll look into implementing that.

Cards and signs is a good idea too.

Looking for / posting on forums now. I'M BEING PAID TO BROWSE THE WEB! yay.

thanks for your awesome suggestions!

A big thing is to keep it lively by hook or crook... even if you have to twist arms to get people to post at the beginning. If I get interested in a topic and go looking for a forum, one of the first things I look at is how active the posting is. Potential new users are not encouraged by lags of days or weeks between posts.

I've never had much to do with forums, so this is purely speculation, but I would say to start with fewer topics/categories than you may be tempted to create - then expand later as activity increases. My guess is that one would get kind of excited about creating good topics, but if you have many, and most of them have no more than one or two messages, then it looks thin and dead.

Ooops I forgot to finish my last sentence - I was going to say - Register and make a few intelligent, interesting comments, but don't actively promote your forum. Put it in your profile and in your sig, and if people are intrigued enough by you (and who wouldn't be), they'll click on the link!

Thanks taz and iconomy.

I send out an email to all my members once every two weeks - I'll make a dignified plea for posts then.

Indeed, iconomy - that's just the approach I'm taking. I hate shameless spammers!

You could always post it to Projects - that gets a lot of eyeballs.