Crowdfunding close, clarifications, and concept art (Patreon)

The campaign is over, and we can't thank you enough for the $24,100 we managed to raise!

This has been a challenging two-month period, and I can't believe how much has changed between when I started to focus on campaign prep and now. 

Working on this campaign meant needing to promote it, and - as a content marketer at heart - that meant creating a LOT of content, more than I have for AniFem in years. Through the need to create content about our funds while going through the process of raising money in a new way, I've ended up completely reworking our business model and laying out a clear three-year strategy I couldn't have even imagined two months ago. 

Responses to that have been... interesting. 

Over two years in, I'm getting pretty tired of the accusation that I'm lying through my teeth in order to make money by exploiting marginalised anime fans. Fundraising for something other than freelancer pay for the first time ever has brought the new suggestion that we're not prioritising freelancer pay highly enough, while my renewed commercial focus and direction has kicked the dust off conversations about how running a company to make money in any way can never be ethical. 

It felt good to address these points in this, my last crowdfunding editorial for the foreseeable future... but honestly, we've been here before and I know from experience that I can't win that mentality over through transparency alone. 

On the plus side, that means I can look to the past to predict what's likely to happen next. 

I've had many of these conversations before, especially back when we launched AniFem and put a Patreon link on absolutely everything we posted. Too many people were suspicious, sharing the most cynical interpretations about even our most innocuous of goals. However, over time and proving that we would do what we set out to do and remain receptive to feedback, we've built a reputation for ourselves as commercially ethical. 

In some ways, it makes this current wave of harsh judgement all the harder to take. (After two months of pouring heart and soul into this campaign I haven't got the thickest skin for criticism of my motivations.) In other ways, it's actually quite reassuring. 

In two more years, I want people to speak as highly of our e-commerce efforts as they currently do our content operations, if not more so. "Say what you want about AniFem, but they raise and use their money ethically" is a common refrain from even people who proclaim proudly how much they dislike us. Here's hoping our actions will speak louder than any of these dissenting words, and make our case for us. That approach has worked well so far. 

This isn't to say we're always in the right. Even in this post, I talk about some useful criticisms we've had and acknowledged mistakes that I made. But I learned about those from our supportive community, who shared their concerns under the (correct) assumption that we would want to hear them and take action to address them. When I say "Our community has a track record of stepping up when we need", this kind of interaction is absolutely a part of that. 

Our community really is second-to-none, and I'm delighted to have the hard numbers of "$20,000 in 39 hours" to demonstrate this to people who haven't yet had the pleasure of seeing you in action. 

Thank you again for supporting us, here and at Indiegogo, and I hope you're as excited as I am to see what AniFem will accomplish in 2019!