AniFem Fundraiser Update and Site Announcement: August 2019

It’s been a busy month all across the AniFem board. We’ve got fundraiser updates and a September Site Announcement, so please read on so you’re up to speed on things!

August Accomplishments

Boring Admin Stuff

A lot of this month was spent updating and finalizing contracts, handling first rounds of payments, researching and planning perk fulfillment, and so on. Necessary, yes, but doesn’t make for a flashy update.

Perks Art Designs

Thanks again to everyone who offered feedback on the character designs! Our artist is working on the final designs now.

Site Homepage Design

The Great AniFem Makeover begins in earnest!

Every book needs an eye-catching cover, and every website needs an eye-catching homepage. Our design team took feedback from both staff and readers to deliver a sharp, clean, accessible layout that we’re really happy about.

We still have a few minor tweaks to make, but we should have everything finalized in the next few days and can move forward on designs for individual pages. Tidy your rooms and eat all your veggies, and maybe we’ll give you a sneak peek next month~

Podcast Transcripts

We’re trucking along and produced another two transcripts this month:

• Chatty AF 3: The Re:ZERO Triangle
• Chatty AF 4: Japanese versions of Ghost in the Shell

We’ve officially reached out to another transcriber to help us with the work, so with luck we’ll be able to boost our output in the next month or two. Stay tuned!

September Publication Break

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

—The Red Queen; Through the Looking-Glass

As our summer fundraiser updates can attest, the team has been making steady progress each month. However, we’re not making as much progress as we’d like—definitely not enough to meet the new deadlines we’d set in June—in part because the day-to-day running of the site takes so much of the limited time we have outside of our day jobs.

Burning the candle at both ends has also led to delays on the article publication side of our to-do list. We’ve been struggling to keep up with our contributors (as anyone who’s pitched to us in the last couple months knows) and meet our publication dates.

We’ve managed it, because the team is full of rock(et) stars—but as the Red Queen notes above, most days it feels like we’re running as fast as we can just to stay in one place. The entire staff has been feeling the strain of those demands as of late, and prioritizing the health of our workers will always be our number one priority at AniFem.

So! We’ve come up with a compromise of sorts: During the month of September, we will not be publishing new articles. Instead, we’ll do “reruns” of articles from 2017 or earlier. 

This gives you, our readers, a chance to discover some older pieces you may have missed, and it gives our staff a chance to focus on fundraiser projects, catch up on backlogs, and hopefully have a little time to recharge before Fall Premieres and end-of-year projects come a-calling.

Don’t worry, though! Podcasts, Talk, and Links posts will continue as scheduled, so there’ll still be some hot new #content to check out in the coming weeks.

Thanks as always for your understanding and support, and if you have any questions please feel free to drop them in the Comments below!