2. 2
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
3. 3
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!
4. 4
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!
5. 5
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.
6. 6
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.
7. 7
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:
8. 8
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!
9. 9
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.
10. 10
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).
