This is Midwesterner’s wife (maybe one day I’ll figure out how to create my own file here 🙂 )
When my oldest daughter was dating, a friend gave me great advice. Do the work yourself. Get names of boys from various sources and track them down, get people to red your child to them. Find connections to those boys. It used to be that girls waited for the boys to find them. I have found that nowadays, there are plenty of girls’ mothers who are doing their research about the boys and once they find the boy, it’s easier to convince a shadchan to red it, since you did half the homework for them.
A rebbetzin once told my friend who had an older daughter, that she should make some concrete hishtadlus every week. She should make a phone call to a shadchan, to a friend in a city with a yeshiva, a relative who is a rebbe in another yeshiva… There are always connections to be made, you just have to be creative.
Certainly daven and find zechusim. Another friend organized a machsom lifi for single girls with hope it would be a zechus for her daughter as well. When you do mitzvohs, say it should be a zechus for your daughter.
Yet another friend had a daughter who married older. When her children would get into an argument, she would ask them to be mevater and say that keeping quiet creates an eis ratzon and that they should use it to ask Hashem for their sister to find her zivug.
In other words, short of investing in the Nasi program(especially if you can’t afford it) do your own homework both spiritually and physically.
and physically doesn’t only mean paying a fancy shadchan. Although I found my way very taxing, I felt at least I was involved in the process.
The more homework you do about boys, the more you get a feel of who is out there.
You can also have your daughter and her friends look out for each other. How many shidduchim have been made when a girl didn’t think a boy on a date was her type, but she red the boy afterward to her friend and they got engaged?
It has been said that most shadchanim come from friends and family. In my family, my parents made shidduchim for their nieces and our aunts and uncles made ours. A lady I know has her second daughter engaged quite young k’ah. She told me her first son in law made the shidduch for her second daughter!