- It's a mini-directory of a market's stallholders
- You has an interactive map and listing of all stallhodlers, with a unique profile for each
- It allows each stallholder to setup and maintain their profile, reducing the need for central administration
** A place to tell stories **A directory lets you share profiles of your members with your community. This includes their story, their location and contact details. It's an interactive place for customers to learn more about the producers who participate at their market, and where their food comes from. The directory can be embedded in your own website.
Setting up a Farmer's Market Group Page on the OFN is a two part process:
- Create a group page- this acts as a directory of all producers who participate in the market(s).
- Add your stallholder’s profiles to the group page- You may need to create profiles for stallholders, or they can do this themselves.
If you manage or are involved in a farmers market and would like to create an OFN group page for it, the first thing to do is to contact us and we’ll setup the page for you. Your market group page will be a personalised directory of enterprises who participate in your markets. For an example checkout the Melbourne Farmer’s Markets group page below.
Once we’ve created a group page for you, you can customise it with your own content, including an about us blurb, logo and photos. For more details about managing content on your group page click here. Adding ‘enterprises’, or your members’s profiles, to your group page is discussed below.
Once your page is setup the next step is to add profiles of your member enterprises to the group, this includes the market(s) itself and your stallholders. You can create a profile for your market(s) by following steps 1-4 in the Hub setup manual and then adding the profiles to the group. You can also add any stallholder profiles that are already on the OFN, just search for these in the group admin page. There are two options for setting up profiles for your members who don’t already have a profiles on the OFN.
The farmers’ market manager may choose to set up profiles for their stallholders on their behalf. This option is appealing as you’ll get your members setup quickly and have something to show them to help them visualise the new platform.
Here is the link to the relevant section of the hub user manual which describes how to create multiple profiles for producers.
If you chose this option, it’s a good idea to set these profiles to ‘invisible’ until you’re ready to launch the new group page. When markets launch they’ll often send out an email to members. Part of this process is to give members the options of taking ownership of their profiles, so that they can keep them up to date. This email is a good chance to explain the intention of the group and to invite participation.
To transfer ownership of a profile to the stallholder, edit that profile and type the stallholder’s email in the ‘notification’ field, within the ‘Users’ tab. This will trigger an email to that address, and when confirmed, that user will become the ‘manager’ of that profile, will full ability to login and modify it. More details about transferring ownership can be found here.
Alternatively, you can ask your stallholders to each setup their own profile. They can do this by following the steps in the producer setup manual. When their profile is setup, they’ll need to let you know so you can add them to your group page, in the group page admin.
Note: Asking members to place their preferences into a google form is a good way to efficiently capture their responses (e.g. if they want to take ownership of a profile, or if they want to be added to your group).
Instruction are available for how to embed your group page into your website.