WWOOF  INTERNSHIP  GUIDE  FOR  BEGINNER  

 

by Ngoc Quyen

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Hello newbie! First I want to congratulate on your new position at WWOOF Sweden. Now you must be very eager to handle your very first tasks, right? Been there, done that! And that’s also the reason why you are reading this guide, written by an ex-intern in order to help you imagine what your tasks will be and should be! As an internship at WWOOF Sweden, you will be the one who answers emails from WWOOFers as well as people interested in volunteering at WWOOF Sweden; you will have to take care of the WWOOF Sweden help page using Wordpress; you will take care of WWOOF Sweden Facebook & Instagram account… just to name a few. “But how exactly should I do that?” – you may ask. Well, don’t worry my friend. Here is how…

Table  of  Contents  

Our  main  page  http://www.wwoof.se  ..............................................................................  3  

The  weekly  recap  .....................................................................................................................  4  Email-­‐response  .........................................................................................................................  4  

Issues  from  WWOOFers’  side...............................................................................................  5  

Issues  from  farm  hosts’  side  ................................................................................................  5  Issues  out  of  my  responsibilities  ........................................................................................  6  

The  WWOOF  Sweden  help  page  ..........................................................................................  6  WWOOF  Sweden  Facebook  &  Instagram  account  .........................................................  7  

What  to  do  with  WWOOFers’  postal  addresses?  ...........................................................  9  

How  about  WWOOFing  during  my  time  at  WWOOF  Sweden?  ..................................  9  Anything  else  I  need  to  know?  ..........................................................................................  10  

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Our  main  page  http://www.wwoof.se   As an internship, you will have an account to access to this page, also granted 1 year of free membership, meaning you can do your volunteering in any farm in Sweden (with their agreement upon time, of course) without paying membership fee. Yay! Once you have the access to the site, your main tasks here are quite easy. You will (1) follow the activities of the members (both farm hosts and WWOOFers) to see if they need any assistance, and (2) take care of the News and Articles from WWOOF Sweden section (see top right corner on the site). Basically, you don’t need to do much with the 1st task, as they will contact us ASAP if they need our help. For the 2nd one, it’s like a bulletin, as I can say. We post news, stories from WWOOFers, tips, announcements, etc.

As you can see, it’s quite easy to start writing something by first clicking “Add new post”. Then you will have to add title, pictures, and the content of the post. However, the format is tricky for newbie. So you have to enter the Markdown-supported site to see the guideline for formatting. Quite complicated in the beginning, but then you will master it after some posts. During my internship time, I published 2 posts about WWOOFers’ stories, as well as 1 post about Travel in Sweden – which is still pending waiting for Jandi to add some pictures!

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The  weekly  recap   Every Monday, Jandi will receive an automatic email called The weekly recap with all the information about what happened with WWOOF Sweden during the past week. The recap is mainly about new registrations, new feedbacks (from both sides), and other issues. Most of the feedbacks are positive, however we still have negative ones. For negative ones, Jandi will contact the writers (either WWOOFers or farm hosts) and talk more about the issues, whether it’s subjective or objective, or whether there are any misunderstandings here. For positive ones from WWOOFers, we read them through and pick out the most interesting one(s), and contact WWOOFers to ask if they want to share their stories and experiences on our communication channels (Facebook, Wordpress, and WWOOF News & Articles). Until now, Jandi is the one who deals with this weekly recap.

Email-­‐response   You will be in charged of 2 accounts: www.uservoice.com (using jandi@wwoof.se), and contact@wwoof.se New passwords should be created for you, as mine is top-secret ☺ Anyway, what is the difference between these mails? The 1st one is mainly used, I can say. Farm hosts, WWOOFers, and potential WWOOFers will use this email to contact us whenever they need help and support from WWOOF Sweden. You can easily see that they can contact Jandi directly. I myself only used this account to reply emails. If you, as a representative of WWOOF Sweden, want to contact someone, for example asking for his or her postal addresses (“What for?” – you now wonder. I’ll let you know later!), please use the 2nd one. People also send emails regarding WWOOFing in Sweden to this email account, but not that much as the other one. P/S: The 2nd email is a paradise for spams. So please make sure that you log in everyday to clean up the mess!

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Issues  from  WWOOFers’  side   From the WWOOFers as well as WWOOFers-to-bes’ sides, the most popular issues are: - Visa application (for those who need visa to enter Sweden) - Payment issues (how to process payment, cannot pay online, already paid but receive no confirmation / response…) - How to contact farm hosts - How to travel to and within Sweden - WWOOFing certificates for their further reference (personal) - The process of registering as a WWOOFer - Etc. You can solve most of these problems. You can either answer them directly on the email or guiding them to read more at our WWOOF Sweden help page, which provides the answers for almost these questions. You will find the link to the help page later in this guide. However, there are issues that are out of your responsibilities. In this case, please move to “Issues out of my responsibilities”.

Issues  from  farm  hosts’  side   From farm hosts’ side, the issue is mainly about how to activate the “Urgent help” button – which simply means that they need urgent help at the moment and they will welcome more volunteers than usual. The answer can be found in the WWOOF Sweden help page also. Other issues can be: - No-show volunteers - How to deactivate their accounts - Payment issues - Etc. Jandi will be in charged of these problems, FYI. Besides, you will receive emails called “Host registered”, meaning that new farms want to register as WWOOF Sweden farm hosts. For these emails, Jandi will arrange interviews with them and discuss about joining WWOOF Sweden. Then he will decide whether these farms can be registered as members of WWOOF Sweden farm hosts.

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Issues  out  of  my  responsibilities   Sometimes you will receive emails with issues such as payment (unsuccessful payment, already paid but no response…), certificates issue for WWOOFers, insurance claims, and so on. These issues, however, are out of your responsibilities, or at least at the moment I had my internship at WWOOF Sweden. All you can do is to inform Jandi about them, so that he can provide help ASAP. One of the issues we often face is that asking for letter of recommendation or papers to apply for a visa to enter Sweden (for those who need a visa to enter Sweden). Please keep in mind that we do not provide any kind of these papers. Volunteers have to manage to apply for a visa by themselves. You can read more about that in our WWOOF Sweden help page by clicking this link: https://wwoofsweden.wordpress.com/2015/09/01/sorry-we-cannot-help-with-your-visa/ In most cases we have the general answers on the WWOOF Sweden help page. However, in case of being unsure, just ask Jandi.

The  WWOOF  Sweden  help  page   OK, now I have talked a lot about the WWOOF Sweden help page, but I give you no hint what it is about! Here it is! This page https://wwoofsweden.wordpress.com/ is created based on Wordpress. This is considered as FAQs, in my opinion. The articles are mainly about answering the most common concerns that WWOOFers and farm hosts may face during their time volunteering and/or hosting. As you can see, there is one article written in Arabic. The good news is that you don’t need to have Arabic language skill to write articles for this site. You can ask your friends or acquaintances, like what I did when we proceeded that article. By the way, that article is about WWOOF not providing any help with the visa application process – one of the most popular questions we faced during the past time! Besides the function of an FAQs-site, the WWOOF Sweden help page also illustrates stories of our previous WWOOFers sharing their experiences and memories during their time volunteering in Sweden. We ask WWOOFers after they finish their volunteering time whether they want to write something for us, then we publish their stories here as a way to promote our activities.

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Currently, we have no action in return for their kindness of writing for us. Jandi and I were talking about sending them a WWOOF Sweden tote bag (handmade, we made!) as a thank-you present. And that’s one of the reasons why you, in the future, will have to contact our WWOOFers and ask for their postal addresses that I’ve mentioned above! If you have your own Wordpress account, that’s great. But if not, don’t be panic. Wordpress provides the easiest way of blogging that I know. All you need is to create an account, and Jandi will make you a contributor for this site. Follow the instructions and you’ll nail it!

WWOOF  Sweden  Facebook  &  Instagram  account   As everybody knows how to deal with Facebook, I’ll skip it. The only thing I want to mention is that you will have to take care of the WWOOF Sweden Facebook account, for example replying to comments, but not all. Sometimes you just have to delete or ignore them, to be honest! For the Instagram account, your tasks include editing and posting pictures on our account on a mostly-daily basis. WWOOFers, after finishing their volunteers in Sweden, will receive an email sent from Jandi about sharing their photos taken during the time they volunteered here. The most preferable ones are those related to farm life, farming activities, working, and cultural aspects… I had a discussion with Jandi about changing the receiving email, as this email will be sent automatically from Jandi’s account, so WWOOFers will send photos directly to him. Then he must forward them to the mail contact@wwoof.se for me, which takes time. The best solution is that Jandi changes the target email address to contact@wwoof.se so that you can receive them directly. After getting photos, should add (1) WWOOF Sweden logo and (2) credit on each of them. Please have a look at a photo that I’ve made on Instagram to have a glimpse of how it should be:

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For editing, I use the epic Adobe Photoshop, of course, and a programme called PhotoScape X, run on iOS. However, feel free to use your most favourite ones and be creative with your own photos editing styles! After processing photos and posting them on Instagram, the next step is to ask the senders for their postal addresses so that we can send them a WWOOF Sweden tote bag as a thank-you gift. Normally, I would collect 10-15 addresses and send the bags out at the same time. Just to save time to go to Willy’s post. Last time we sent out ca. 10 tote bags for all the photos we used!

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What  to  do  with  WWOOFers’  postal  addresses?   I wrote an email like this to ask for their postal addresses when needed: Subject: Thank you for your photos / article / story for WWOOF Sweden [feel free to replace any appropriate word] Body: Hej… Thank you so much for your lovely photos for WWOOF Sweden. We are now processing them and they will be published on our Instagram and Facebook [add a time if you already have a time-planning for it, or else just say ASAP]. Do you have an Instagram account so that we can tag you on the photo? We would like to send you a WWOOF Sweden tote bag as a thank-you gift. Please inform us your postal address for sending out the package. Warm regards, [Your name] The WWOOF Team Please note that it’s just an example, meaning you don’t have to strictly follow what I wrote here, as well as you should/can writes it in Swedish when needed. Once you have collected ca. 10 postal addresses, your next task is to prepare tote bags (found in the office) and send to them. The postal service at Willy’s is the one we use, as it’s cheap and convenient. For addresses in China, I recommend you to ask WWOOFers to write in Chinese, then you print them out and paste on the envelope, as we may face problem that not all English-translated addresses can be understood correctly. This is not any racism issue, but the recommendation we received by a Chinese lady we spontaneously met at Willy’s who willingly helped us to translate the address back into Chinese. Some WWOOFers will let us know that they have received the gift (by emails or tagging us on their photos), some not. Jandi and I haven’t talked about that issue, but I think it would be better if we write something like “Please let us know once you receive the package. Any photos-tagging on Facebook or Instagram would be great!”

How  about  WWOOFing  during  my  time  at  WWOOF  Sweden?   As recommended by Jandi, interns can manage his or her own WWOOFing experience while working at WWOOF Sweden. Unfortunately, during my internship, due to some health issue I couldn’t make any volunteering to any farms in Sweden. But I can say it will be fun.

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All you have to do is to discuss with Jandi about the time you want to go, and then contact the farm hosts if it’s OK to volunteer at their farms at that time. And here you go!

Anything  else  I  need  to  know?   Well, things will come up and you will have no idea how to deal with them. Of course you can still ask Jandi for information, or he will take care of them. Yet there are some small things that I want to note down for you: - Always ask for permissions for using photos, from both farm hosts and WWOOFers. They are willing to say, “Yes!” - Always try to answer all the emails you receive by contact@wwoof.se, even though you will find them annoying sometimes. By ‘all the emails’ I don’t mean spams ☺. - If you want to write any post on our communication channels, please make sure that Jandi will read the draft before you publish. - For any of our pictures, photos… don’t forget our logo (and credit if needed).