What can we do for our patrons? (Patreon)

I hope you know how grateful I am for each and every one of you who has jumped on board and stuck with us through our first four months (it feels so much longer!). How to properly reward you is our biggest unsolved mystery here at AniFem, and we're finally giving this question the attention it deserves so we can find an answer before our six-month anniversary. 

I've considered all sorts of possibilities with the team over the past four months, and my initial stab-in-the-dark ideas haven't really worked out. Those of you who requested something and haven't seen it come to fruition, all I can do is apologise. I guarantee you I've been feeling guilty about it for months and am still working towards ways to give you the content you requested, just significantly later than either of us had hoped - and possibly in another medium. 

One avenue that's opened up is simply to increase the channels we use to provide you with content. We've started making podcasts, and - to my extreme surprise - it is actually really fun! After talking with the team through instant messenger for months, talking with them in person is proving to be a delight, and we are having interesting conversation both on and off air. The prospect of giving you more content like this, tailored to your requests, incorporating your questions or utilising the same technology to make the experience more interactive for you has opened up a number of possibilities I couldn't have known existed before.

In addition, while this isn't at public announcement level yet, I am in the process of booking tickets to visit the US later this year to attend two conventions with members of the AniFem team. We hope to host panels and/or conduct a live podcast recording, but at the very least to do a meet-up with patrons, if this is something you would be interested in. I would consider it a privilege to thank even one of you in person for the confidence you have shown in us and the difference it has made to me and the entire team. 

These are some of the plans we are currently working towards as a team which we think might be of interest to you. We have also been working hard behind the scenes to build up a stream of consistent content to a reliable posting schedule. We're not quite there yet, as last week shows, and the reason for that is, in all honesty, because I insist on checking and editing every single piece that goes out of AniFem and obligations in my personal life have got in the way of me doing this in a timely fashion. 

Thanks to other members of the team taking on more responsibilities and instituting new processes we are very, very close to clearing this bottleneck so my personal life is no longer a factor in whether or not AniFem work gets done promptly. In other words, we are in the final stages of transitioning from a blog run mostly by me with a handful of volunteers, to a professional multimedia site which (eventually) pays all the people who work on it. 

We have been paying all writers (except me) since January at a rate of $50 per piece, as well as a few people for support duties at a rate of $15 per hour. I'm still immensely proud that we were able to achieve this so early in our life, and am determined to increase it so that everyone gets paid for their work here. However, we can't actively promote our Patreon until we feel confident we have a patron offering which is fair and attractive, and we need your input to get there. 

By our six-month anniversary I expect you will see a very different kind of AniFem that is much closer to the site I envisioned when we started this project. Thank you as always for your patience while we crack this code. Please read the linked post and let us know how we can best thank you, our most loyal early adopters, and other patrons who will join you in the future.  

Amelia