Feminist Frequency planning two new video series in 2015
Nonprofit organisation outlines plans after a bumper year for donations and social media growth
Anita Sarkeesian's nonprofit organisation Feminist Frequency has outlined its growth plans for 2015, which include two new video series exploring "men and masculinity" and "positive female characters" in video games.
In addition to the new video content, Feminist Frequency will continue to produce episodes for Tropes vs Women in Video Games, the series on which its reputation was built. It also plans to hire more staff, and step up its advocacy work around online harassment.
"My whole team is committed to this work and we are not going anywhere"
Anita Sarkeesian, founder and director
"We have expanded Feminist Frequency's mission to include advocacy around ending online hate and abuse, analysing and advancing awareness of how gendered harassment operates online," said Sarkeesian, the organisation's director.
"Privately, I am working with online feminists to strategise long-term solutions to deal with the epidemic of online abuse and create mechanisms for support. I am also consulting with tech and gaming companies on how to address issues of online harassment in their own communities."
Feminist Frequency experienced another peak in terms of threats and abuse last year, with Sarkeesian forced to cancel a talk at Utah State University due to fears of a violent attack on attendees and staff. However, this incident - along with many others - only served to highlight the organisation's agenda, leading to the sort of high-profile news coverage and TV appearances it may not have received otherwise.
This is backed up by data in Feminist Frequency's annual report, which it is required to produce as a registered nonprofit - a status it gained in May 2014.
Feminist Frequency's YouTube channel breezed past 5.7 million views in 2014, with its most popular single video ("Women as Background Decoration: Part 2") receiving nearly 1 million views. It also more than tripled its Twitter followers, increasing from just over 65,000 at the start of January 2014 to more than 223,000 by the end of December.
That exposure has also given Feminist Frequency access to greater resources to continue its work. Until last year, its primary source of income was crowdfunding, meaning that it operated on a "shoestring budget" for much of 2014. But as the year wore on and public interest grew, so too did Feminist Frequency's donations.
"Thanks to generous contributors, we received a substantial increase in donations at the end of the year, raising just over $230,000 in December alone," Sarkeesian said in the report, which is remarkable given that donations for the first half of the year barely topped $5,000.
"This unexpected increase in revenue will allow us to dedicate these new resources in 2015 to expanding Feminist Frequency's writing and support staff as well as our programming."
As a result of this, Feminist Frequency has set a budget of $400,000 for 2015, an increase of more than 500 per cent over its administrative expenses for last year.
