COMING SOON | Improvements to Patron Relationship Manager

Updates
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Hi, creators!

Our team is working on simplifying the way you manage and connect with your audience on Patreon via patron management tools, and we’d love your feedback!

Improvements to Patron Relationship Manager

Many creators have given us feedback that the existing Patron Relationship Manager needs some love. We’ve received requests for better filtering, more info about patrons, a better mobile experience, and more. We’re listening and investing in improving this experience for you.

We’re cleaning up and consolidating your existing patron management tools. We are currently working on merging our old Patron Manager with the Patron Relationship Manager tab. All the functionality you enjoyed in Patron Manager will still be supported in the new and improved Patron Relationship Manager. See all the details here.

Timeline

In early July, the Manager tab and Patron Relationship Tab will be merged and all features, views, and data in Patron Manager will be available in Patron Relationship Manager. We will then release additional requested features (listed below) and functionality to Patron Relationship Manager throughout 2020 as it evolves into an audience management tool.

What are some of the improvements?

Here are some of the improvements we’re working on or considering for the future:

1. Enhance the ability to filter and search essential patron data to create custom groups of patrons (for tasks like messaging and benefit delivery). Essential patron data includes:

  • Contact info (name, email, location)
  • Payment history
  • Recurring pledge amount
  • Payment status (paid, declined, refund, fraud)
  • Patron status
  • Lifetime pledge amount
  • Current Tier
  • NEW | Patron currency
  • NEW | Patron Anniversary (filter by first pledge date, filterable date range)
  • NEW | Tier Tenure (number of payments on a tier)
  • NEW | Merch specs (e.g. t-shirt size, item details)
  • NEW | Preview/link to last message (link to full message history via Messages)

2. Improve earnings dashboards: Moving earnings data and estimates from patron management tools to the Income dashboard

  • Total lifetime earnings before fees
  • number of active patrons
  • Total pledge amount
  • Estimated earnings per month (this matches the Creator Page earnings)
  • Per post earnings estimates

3. Revamp the mobile experience for patron management

  • Managing your patrons should be easy regardless of where your creativity takes you. We’re aiming to deliver a simple, delightful mobile experience so it’s easy to pull up patron info and manage the details of your business on the go.

HOW TO GET INVOLVED | Comment below!

Help us prioritize new features and functionality by providing feedback! What would you like to see improved with your patron management tools? What are some things you wish Patreon made easier when it comes to managing your patrons? Let us know how you use your patron management tools, especially the features that are critical to running your business, and what other info would make connecting with your patrons easier.

We look forward to your feedback in the comments!

:heart: Your pals from the Product team at Patreon

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Woohoo, thanks @Tina! Such exciting news and we’re all ears to hear your answers to these questions :ear:

  1. What would you like to see improved with your patron management tools?

  2. What are some things you wish Patreon made easier when it comes to managing your patrons?

  3. How are you currently using your patron management tools? Especially the features that are critical to running your business.

  4. What other info would make connecting with your patrons easier?

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To answer 1, 2 and 4… Make the team feature not locked to Premium!!! I’m going to be a pest about this until our 501c3 (/AStageReborn) either qualifies for Premium or gets at least 1 or 2 team logins for our account so we can at least have 1 or 2 of our staff use their own corporate email to assist in Patreon management and not dangerously password-share the main account. :stuck_out_tongue:

Now for some normal-ish answers:

  1. Exit surveys need some TLC. It’s really easy to just select “my financial situation changed” and say nothing else. I think the pre-canned answers should be taken out and Patrons should be encouraged to tell us in their own words not just why they stopped pledging, but what we could do to get them to re-pledge. Maybe “my financial situation changed” really means “could you add your $3 tier back?” It’d be even better if we had a few team accounts on Pro so we could have a dedicated person to focus on exit surveying and data.

  2. To make it easier to manage patrons… Team feature, team feature, team feature! Honestly, just give Pro accounts a limit of one team member even. This will let people team up with a close friend, a business partner, their accountant, someone. The option to have a second set of eyes on your Patreon and pitch in where able is invaluable. It’s like having at least 1 moderator for a livestream.

  3. Right now, the current patreon management tools have just been more informative for me than anything. Due to the lack of useful feedback with exit surveys, those haven’t been very helpful. The benefit tracker is the most useful thing right now but for not being able to pick and choose what you need to track (but I know that’s being fixed soon!) I’m planning to start making greater use of the benefit tracker but it’d be great if we had some team functionality on Pro so I can have one or two people working with me on creating and delivering benefits like Bonjoro videos to every patron!

  4. Patreon feels like a very insular universe still even with all its integrations (i.e., WordPress, public posts shared to social media.) I think giving more social media connections on Patron accounts would help. We can see their Discord and their email. Maybe we have a super dedicated patron we’d love to check out their Twitter or something and like their posts, follow them, etc. It also lets us know what social media our supporters are using most so we can see outside of Patreon what the best way to reach out to our supporters on other platforms is. It’d also be nice if they had options to set their IRL name and a nickname in addition to their member name so we know what they’re called generally, know their name (for shipping address tiers at least) separately from just their Patreon account’s name. People use monikers all over the place and lots of times I’ve had to double-take between Patreon and Discord to figure out who’s who again. Notes are great, but user notes aren’t really set up for this sort of thing unless Pro had a team feature to help maintain notes with all this information.

Did I mention my screaming desire for Pro to have a team feature to help make use of all these awesome upcoming updates? :upside_down_face:

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I like some of these features, like sorting by “tier tenure” and a link to the last message we shared. All that sounds very handy! I look forward to seeing the new improvements.

The fundamental feature I will miss from the old manager is still missing, however. Soon I will want to see a list of who was charged in April, and what their status was. I routinely use this feature of the old manager to scan over the list of a certain tier that gets an item each month, and check how many rewards I owe them. I understand benefits exist, but I like knowing exactly how their charges went through in each month, for reassurance and so I can easily tell the patron “You’re only getting 1 item, since your charge only went through in May”. My conception of how you’d do that with the current UI is a dropdown for “Charged in: December 2019/January 2020/February 2020”, etc.

Also, I hope you would consider making the list more straightforward and tabular in appearance. It suffers from so much whitespace it’s hard to visually scan, it has an annoying hardcoded 50-item pagination limit, not all columns are sortable, and as a result it just doesn’t feel like something to get real work done in. The old manager, however ugly, didn’t have these problems. And for the most part, neither does Kickstarter’s, to use another comparison. I really can’t stand how light and airy this design is for a part of the site that should be about presenting lots of raw data for me to examine, so I would hope that this could be changed as more features are added.

And in case they’re not, I should also ask: is CSV export sticking around? :slight_smile:

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Patreon Message Feedback

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The main reason I have always gone to the old Manager vs the Relationship Manager is because I can see a breakdown of all of the Patrons at each tier for a given month on one page. In particular, I look at the one for the current and previous month for sending out physical rewards as I order prints at the end of the month. That is very important for me. Will that still be available?

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Speaking of CSV exports, it would be amazing if Patreon had a preferred partner (like Stride for healthcare) that was about using the CSV export to send custom physical rewards.

Many of us don’t quality for Premium to get merch, and many of us do simple things like sending a monthly postcard. I know most creators just figure it out for themselves but I think it’d be awesome guidance if Patreon had a place they endorsed and updated the CSV downloads so we could very easily just download an address-containing CSV, upload it to a product partner’s service to automatically send out – here’s the big part – without having to modify the CSV!

If this was arranged, in the future Patreon could probably work on a partnership with a particular service that made it easy to instantly send very simple rewards and take it out of the earnings. This wouldn’t butt against the incentive to grow and qualify for bigger merch, but imagine if starter and Pro/Legacy plans could at least send a customized postcard to one tier each month with a simple no-problems export/import?

If such a service already exists though, I’d love to know. I know there’s places where you can upload an address list but not something that simply takes the Patreon export as-is without having to edit a spreadsheet every single month. With a handful of Patrons it’s doable, but with my schedule not having to take the time to go through Patreon, the CSV, editing and double checking names and addresses, clearing bad ones, formatting it however is needed for something like Vistaprint, etc. – it’d be nice if this process was streamlined even if it was just for one custom postcard delivery system.

I put this reply in here since it’d be something I think would be a part of / that I’d like with the patron manager system.

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The old Patron manager is still the easiest way to get the info I’m looking for. The simple list works perfectly if you want to look something up quickly. I don’t find the newer relationship manager to be a good product at all. It’s hard to manage and navigate.

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Thanks for the feedback @chris1612, can you provide more info about what info you’re often looking to gather in Patron Manager? Any more detail about what makes PRM hard to manage and navigate? Thank you so much!

Yes @dekilah, all features, views, and data in Patron Manager will be available in Patron Relationship Manager.

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Patreon anniversary sounds awesome! I’ve been looking forward to a way to reward legacy supporters, or patrons that fulfill a certain cumulative pledge threshold. That would be pretty cool.

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I really want the ability to make something repeating every x months. ESPECIALLY given that people are being taxed now.
I have prints that will go out every year, currently I’m just sitting there waiting for twelve stacks to happen before sending a print.

Also can Patrons opt out of certain things to avoid taxes? So if somebody doesn’t receive a physical good, shouldn’t they not have to pay taxes on it?

Sorry if this was addressed above. Mobile reading is lacklustre.

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We’ve wondered about that too. We know that not all of our patrons actually take advantage of the different offered benefits, yet they might be taxed on them whether they do or not. I guess it would be too difficult for Patreon to track who is actually using the benefits or not . . .

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I’m thinking that items which require a shipping address are already tracked so it shouldn’t be too hard.

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Yeah, in our case it’s more like listening to bonus episodes, which is taxable, but not everyone listens to them.

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Yeah that would be a lot harder to check.

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I made some suggestions back here: [Feature Request] Automatic Deletion of Pledge

I also like the idea of being able to have one other team member on the pro plan!

Thanks for your amazing work!

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I don’t know if this falls into the same category, but I would love to see this small tweak made to improve the creator experience:

Brian

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Does this mean what I think it means?? All of our messages with a patron in one place for easy reference? Because that would be AWESOME!

Brian

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The original manager has a list of all patrons, divided in each category and all additional information. It’s a great overview and info is easy to access. I don’t think that the next generation of the manager offers a function like this + there is a lot of white space with the newer version of the manager.

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Okay, will this include that you can get the information in the Manager what someone’s maximum monthly pledge is, while you can’t get that info from the Relationship Manager? That is one example of some important information that I can only get from the Manager right now. Thanks!

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