This story discusses sensitive topics, including sexual exploitation, child abuse, and violence against women. The content references efforts to combat harmful material on digital platforms, including mentions of sexual violence in gaming, child exploitation materials, and adult content. Readers should be aware that it contains references to disturbing content that Collective Shout campaigns against. If you find these topics distressing, please consider whether this content is appropriate for you at this time.
The challenge: confronting companies that profit from harmful content
The normalization of sexualization and objectification of women and girls had become so pervasive that it formed what founder Melinda Tankard Reist calls "the wallpaper of society.”
“We see sexually exploitative content everywhere: billboards at traffic lights, products on store shelves, and games on popular platforms,” Tankard Reist explains, “creating a culture where harm is so commonplace it becomes invisible.”
Tankard Reist wrote Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls in response to the harms caused, especially to girls, by this content. Collective Shout was born out of readers wanting to address it.
"One of the contributors, a young woman struggling with body image issues, wrote to me after the book came out, and said it was a 'collective shout against the pornification of culture'. Readers were also writing to me asking, 'What can we do?' That's how Collective Shout was born."
Traditional advocacy methods weren't scaling to match the global reach of the problem. Collective Shout would post on social media asking supporters to contact companies with scattered information, hoping its supporters would follow through. The movement was winning campaigns but couldn't track impact, grow their supporter base, or maintain momentum between victories.
"We had a lot of success, even with that method," explains Coralie Alison, Movement Operations Manager at Collective Shout. "But we weren't growing our mailing list, and people would just come back and say 'done' or 'sent an email.' We had no way of knowing how many people had taken action in total.”
The solution: turning supporter outrage into measurable global impact
The transformation from scattered efforts to strategic movement accelerated when Alison attended a NationBuilder training course, flying interstate to master the platform's advocacy capabilities. What started as a technical skills session became the catalyst for revolutionizing how a small Australian team could take on billion-dollar industries.
Entry point: effortless action drives measurable advocacy results
ActionButton became their gateway tool, transforming supporter engagement from hope-based to data-driven activism. Instead of asking people to compose new emails and copy and paste contact information, Collective Shout could embed widgets directly into campaign blogs, making supporter engagement natural and easy.
Advanced engagement: transforming supporters into movement leaders
Where ActionButton is the entry point for many of their supporters, NationBuilder is the underlying machinery. The platform enabled sophisticated supporter journeys, segmented fundraising based on donation history, location-based event invitations, and targeted follow-up campaigns for those who hadn't yet taken action on specific issues.
Core programs: advocacy campaigns that deliver policy and platform change
Corporate accountability: consumer pressure that forces corporate change
ActionButton allows Collective Shout to target up to 20 decision-makers simultaneously with each campaign. Their victories include sexually violent games being removed and Andrew Tate's pimping courses being removed from Spotify. When the organization discovered child abuse dolls on platforms like Temu and Shein, strategic ActionButton deployment meant products were removed within 24 hours.
Interactive reform: holding platforms accountable for their content
One of Collective Shout's most remarkable campaigns of 2025 was their work encouraging the removal of games depicting rape and incest from the Steam gaming platform, mobilizing over 70,000 supporters. The Steam campaign demonstrates Collective Shout’s evolved systematic approach to move decision-makers.
"Following our successful campaign… to get rape simulation game No Mercy pulled from the gaming platform,” writes Caitlin Roper, Campaign Manager, “we discovered almost 500 other games depicting rape, incest, sexual torture, and child abuse."
This led to the Collective Shout team deciding to target credit card companies and payment gateways, which facilitated - and profited from - sales transactions for the sale of gamified violence against women.
The campaign mobilized nearly 3,500 supporters using the Custom Email Target ActionButton to Steam leadership, and another 1,000 to successfully pressure payment processors like Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal to uphold their existing policies around hosting such content. As a result, Steam pulled close to 500 games.
Another popular gaming platform, itch.io, went even further, delisting 20,000 games with sexual themes while they performed an internal audit to ensure compliance with the new terms of service.
Legislative advocacy: turning citizen pressure into government action
Their strategy for government campaigns has also achieved concrete policy wins. As a result of pressure from Collective Shout, the Australian federal government began an age verification trial in December 2024 to help prevent children from being exposed to pornography. This came after years of coordinated pressure, including parliamentary submissions, media engagement, and an open letter signed by over 50 women’s safety and child protection advocates.
Platform value: technology that amplifies advocacy impact
NationBuilder's integrated platform, including its built-in advocacy tools, enable Collective Shout's five-person team to operate at the scale of organizations dozens of times their size. The platform's segmentation capabilities mean they can run location-specific event invitations across Australia's vast geography, while ActionButton data helps them understand which supporters are most engaged for spokesperson recruitment. The donor management system enables personal follow-up calls that turn one-time supporters into committed advocates.
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"We're just five part-time women, often operating on our mobile phones in between other appointments. The vested interests of Big Tech and the global porn industry have been put before the wellbeing of the community for too long. Collective Shout demonstrates the critical role of civil society in holding these corporations to account. Our efforts |
Coralie Alison, |
The tagging system creates ongoing campaign intelligence. When Collective Shout wants to send updates about specific victories, they can target only those who participated in that campaign. For follow-up pressure, they can exclude those who have already acted and focus on supporters who haven't yet engaged.
"Having a platform where we can track information, where our board chair can be notified when someone donates and leave notes for the rest of us—that really helps."
Evidence of transformation: lasting policy and platform victories
Collective Shout's victories this year demonstrate its expanding influence. A Canadian pension fund became the seventh major investor to dump Playboy shares after pressure from the organization, and child sex doll sellers were removed from X (Twitter) and Temu in separate campaigns.
Notably, their Steam campaign marked a turning point in gaming platform accountability. The campaign's success triggered such backlash that Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur for Violence Against Women, publicly came out in support of the movement. The Online Hate Prevention Institute described the backlash as "gamergate on steroids."
Bold vision: expanding global impact with strategic campaigns
Collective Shout’s "potential campaigns folder" contains enough domestic and global issues to keep expanding their impact indefinitely, while their systematic approach to campaign selection ensures they choose battles they can win.
Current active campaigns demonstrate their evolving sophistication: pressuring major investors like pension funds to divest from exploitation-based industries and coordinating with international partners to create multi-jurisdiction pressure on global platforms.
"Our success shows the power of every voice and the power of using every lever at our disposal, including the tools provided by NationBuilder,” says Tankard Reist.
The organization's global recognition, including support at the UN level, positions them to influence policy far beyond Australia's borders. Collective Shout’s proven model of strategic technology use, precise targeting, and relentless follow-up offers a blueprint for advocacy organizations worldwide.
Data-driven impact:
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64% email list growth in 4 months using ActionButton (from 6,985 to 11,429 supporters)
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40,000+ global supporters now engaged across platforms
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36+ wins achieved by September of 2025, breaking their 2024 record
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Almost 500 harmful games removed from Steam & 20k deindexed from Itch.io for auditing
Follow to learn more about Collective Shout:
Web: collectiveshout.org
IG: @collective.shout
X: @collectiveshout
FB: Collective Shout
LinkedIn: Collective Shout
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