We did it! On crowdfunding success and stretch goals

Over one intense weekend, we met our $19,900 crowdfunding goal just 38 hrs after launching the campaign.

We met our first stretch goal just two hours later.

You can see how it all unfolded in (somewhat) real time in the post I updated for the first 48 hours of the campaign, our Indiegogo updates, and our tweet thread of the excruciating final countdown to our goal.

Crowdfunding campaigns aren’t easy. They’re especially challenging for organisations that don’t have a physical product to promote, are raising for purposes that won’t necessarily feel relevant to every contributor, and are asking for money at the most expensive time of year.

This result is a testament to the strength of our community. Your outpouring of support blew us away, and we can’t thank you enough.

But it isn’t over yet. Our campaign ends 08:00 UTC on Saturday 29 December, and we’ll be hustling until the last second.

After two years of having to quash ideas with “We can’t afford it” or “Not until we’re accessible,” it’s a pleasure just to be able to finally consider which AniFem projects we could achieve with a small amount of extra money through a stretch goal. A lot of distant dreams are starting to feel not only possible, but within reach.

We have an ambitious vision for AniFem’s future, which we hinted at in our first editorial and pre-launch video. Meeting our goal so early in a month-long campaign offers us a huge opportunity to get much closer to it – fast.

Where could we be in three months? By summer? This time next year?

None of our stretch goals are guesses. We’ve been taking the time to calculate cost estimates, delivery times, and likely impact, and prioritising accordingly. All are driven by community feedback from the past two years and balanced by our professional ambitions for the next two. It’ll take time to fund everything we want to accomplish – and there is a lot we want to accomplish.

Last weekend, we raised money because we badly needed to. Until 29 December we’re raising money to fund projects we’ve long been passionate about, in service of our community and our vision. It’s a different position than we’ve ever been in, and the potential ahead of us is unbelievably exciting.

We are, at the time of writing, $662 away from Stretch Goal 2, to create a centralised, searchable, automatically updated review database once we hit $22,500.

After that, we have Stretch Goal 3 at $25,000, where we’ll set up an online shop on our site and design our first range of merchandise to sell through it.

After that, I have a few costed ideas that I’m happy to share… as soon as we hit Stretch Goal 2 and know that further stretch goals are even required.

Our campaign has, understandably, slowed considerably since the incredible success of our first few days. We have plans to give out new sneak peaks, insights, and behind-the-scenes tidbits which should help to bring momentum back up to a steadier trickle, but we’ll need your help to spread the word every step of the way.

Keep sharing our posts, tweets, and campaign page, ideally with your personal endorsement of our work/organisation/campaign, and help us clear our stretch goals before 29 December!