Penship

Sincerely, The Penship Team

Hey Everyone! It’s been a while. As you probably know we had moved our services over to Instagram for a while. It wasn’t very ideal but had to be done. Well, we’ve been working on making a proper website for Penship and right now it’s in it’s Beta version of the site! Woo! It’s public, you can go check it out. But! It’s also in the beginning stages so it might not look all that special yet. At the moment you can register to be a member. However, we currently have it set so that all members have to be manually approved. This is just so we can slowly add people and have a bit of control over how many users can access the member pages while the site is still in it’s Beta version. We’re hoping to have it in a more finalized version near the end of the month, but timelines tend to get pushed around a bit so we’ll just have to see how it goes! If you don’t mind at all that the site is still in a Beta version and want to test it out, please register and help us test out our site! On the downside, there might be some kinks we still need to iron out. On the upside, you’ll be one of the first to use the new Penship and play an important role of giving us feedback to build a better site! Anyways! Regardless of if you choose to register now or later (or never 😥) - It’s good to be back and we would like to thank you all very much for always being a supportive, wonderful community. Love always, The Penship Team

We are going to start with simple templates first to see how it goes. In the future we’ll likely come out with more styles or at least more background choices so you can choose one that suits you more. Hopefully we’ll also be able to add more language options over time (but for now we’re just starting out with English to see how it goes and what can be improved). All the templates will be posted to a highlight on our IG page (along with an example of how to fill it out). Once you save the template, just fill it out and post it to your story! As long as you’ve mentioned our Instagram @ penshipofficial and made sure your settings allow others to share your story, we’ll be able to see your post and share it to our Instagram!  Then it will be put in a highlight made for all the people who have filled out the template.  Every Sunday we will go through and remove any posts that are 2+ weeks old from the highlight, to make sure all of the posts there are recent. Or, if you want it removed earlier you can just send us a DM! Since it’s a lot easier to add and remove to a highlight on Instagram, it shouldn’t take us long to make updates.  As for safety, Instagram already has a lot of handy safety features built in! When you receive a message from someone that you don’t follow on Instagram, it usually ends up in your “Requests”. From there you can read the message without the other person knowing unless you accept their message. Images are also hidden/blurred unless you choose to see it. We can also post tips to our story and create a highlight for it if it’s something that you’d like to see!  What we hope is that with this new system we will be able to provide you with a faster service that’s less time consuming for our team. With the extra time, we’ll be able to focus on bringing new and better things for you to enjoy over time (secret santa, giveaways, etc)! And one of the things I’ve personally wanted to start working towards is opening a Penship store (online shop) so I’m really excited for this to be more of a possibility. SO. If you’d like to continue this journey with us (which I hope you do), please follow us at penshipofficial on Instagram!  As for our database and everything else, we’ll be completely deleting the database and submissions posted on Penship as long as the switch to Instagram goes well. No one who has submitted a post will have info leftover to worry about. We do still have a lot of old requests to send off that are in the process of being sent, but unfortunately any submissions that hadn’t been processed won’t be posted due to the changes being made. I do apologize for that as I’m sure there’s a few of you who were still looking forward to them being posted.  I think this pretty much covers everything but in case you have questions about the changes you can send me a message on my personal Instagram (or if you’re just curious what one of the faces behind Penship looks like you can click and find out). The Penship email is currently pretty clogged up and I don’t check my personal email often enough these days so this is the best way to get a response within a fair amount of time (I will try my best to be quick about it).  The changes will be made to our Instagram after making sure to share this update on our other platforms first. Again, I really hope you’ll enjoy the switch and stay with us as we grow 💗 Sincerely,  Michaela (Penship’s Founder)

Penship is going to be closing for a while. I’m sure many of you have noticed that over the past month or so, things have been less and less organized, slow, and we’re struggling to run Penship the same as before.  I wanted to address this myself, as Penship’s founder, because a lot of it is due to changes in my own life. I moved to South Korea from Canada back in August and since then haven’t been able to work on Penship, basically at all. My schedule became really packed and busy and I kept trying to make time for working on Penship but it never happened. As for the other team members, a lot (if not all) of them have become really busy in their personal lives as well. Essentially, there isn’t much of an active team to run Penship these days and for that reason I’ve decided we need to shut down for a bit to build the team back up so that it’s stronger and more ready to handle the amount of requests and submissions we get each day. I made Penship back around 2010? so I’ve put a lot of my own time and effort into this community. It really means a lot to me, so I’d like to be clear that I am in no way giving up. The reality of it is though, I don’t make a living from it and it’s become less and less of a priority over time because I have so many other things I’d like to make time for in my own life. BUT I would really love to make Penship into something even more amazing. I want to continue to help people make friends around the world. So over the next few weeks I’ll do my best to bring it back together. I’ve scheduled time into my weeks to work on Penship, getting remaining requests and submissions cleared so we’re ready to start fresh. I’ll also potentially work (given that I have enough time) on creating a Patreon for Penship. I have so so many things I’d love to improve with Penship and build it into something better, but I don’t have the funds to do it (despite living in another country, I’m actually kind of poor - just very savvy?). I don’t want to give away ideas and plans yet, better to save it for the Patreon, but I definitely would love to work on getting Penship on a more automatic system as right now the team members and I do everything manually. It takes up an insane amount of time that could be spent working on other things for Penship.  Anyways I’m really sorry for the past months with things being all over the place. I hope you can forgive me and look forward to our return. I’m not setting an exact date for when we’ll open again, as I’m not sure how long it will take to catch up and build up our team. However as soon as we can see the finish line I’ll be sure to announce an opening date! In the meantime, our team member Unni will likely still keep our Instagram going (which you can find here) for lots of great snail mail inspiration! Also, final thing, as I’ll be building our team back up we will be very actively looking for new volunteers to help us run Penship! If you’re interested in being a part of our team, you can go here to view all of our positions and where to apply here: penship.net/volunteer  We do keep all applications on file but if you’ve applied in the past I would recommend applying again if you are still interested. Thank you! Sincerely, Michaela

• Languages How many languages can you speak? Teach your pen pal a new word! Only speak one language? Create a fake language (replace each letter with something else) and write your pen pal a secret message for them to decode. • Nicknames Sure, your pen pal probably knows your name but do you have any nicknames? If so, who gave them to you and why? • Likes & Dislikes There are always going to be things you like and things you don’t. Make a list of your top 10 for both! Likes: Writing letters! Dislikes: When your pen dies halfway through writing a letter. We hope you enjoyed this list! Of course there is so much more than what is on this list, so stay tuned for some more Writing Prompts by following Penship (and find some pen pals while you wait for our next blog post)! Feel free to add to this list or share your ideas with us! P.S. This is our first blog post! In the past, we have only been posting submissions and updates. We know some of you won’t want to see these mixed in with submissions, so you can always use the English Sub tag to filter them out (using tags on our tags page should also filter blog posts out)!

We loved the story about language exchange! It’s so heartwarming to receive a letter from a different country with some words in your native language. Pen pals who care about you and put a smile on your face are the best!  💕 The winners’ giveaway entries will be posted on our social media soon! Make sure you follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram! Elin and Paulina, we hope you use your prizes to decorate your letters and swamp your pen pals with little artsy treats!  Good luck! The Penship Team

The deadline for entries is July 7th!

As a celebration for hitting 20K, we’re having a giveaway! More to come soon 💕