I tried to use this new system. The unmarked complete function made me find it difficult to use, and the csv export failed after changing the keywords.
3 Likes
Can’t you export to a CSV? I do that kind of filtering in excel or numbers pretty easily.
1 Like
but then how can i quickly message the 100+ people that i select? Im not tech savy enough to write a script to do it :S
1 Like
I’ve been trying to use the new relationship manager, but it really doesn’t work for what I’m trying to do.
Every month I have 100+ rewards to send out. To do this quickly and efficiently, I need to have two pages open, the relationship manager with everyone’s addresses, and a word document where I can paste the addresses of those Patrons to be printed out onto shipping labels.
With the old manager, I could resize the web browser to take up half the page, and just go down the list, expanding each patron’s address as I went over them and copy/pasting them.
With the new relationship manager, resizing the web browser hides the addresses. Even at full screen, when I click on a patron, I then have to scroll down on the right to see their address, which adds up when you have to do it for 100 or more individual patrons. Plus, it’s now really easy to miss Patrons because there’s no visual reference for who I’ve already checked.
I appreciate all the work you do at Patreon to improve the site, but the Relationship Manager feels over designed. Your original manager was simple, elegant, and gave me all the information I needed without cluttering up the screen. I’d really prefer if it stayed an option, even if was difficult to reach, because I’m not sure if I can work with the new UI. It’s adding so much time to an already lengthy process that I may have to forgo giving physical rewards entirely, which could result in a lot of lost patronage.
10 Likes
Ah, yes, do you have an email platform like mail chimp or constant contact? You can always import a CSV to create a specific list. It won’t check off the Patrons, but it could handle the “emailing all of them at once” task.
So the question still remains, why is the “check off all patrons in a tier to message them/mark them complete” functionality removed?
It’s a very simple piece of functionality on almost every service ever, I can’t imagine why it would be removed or what benefit it would serve to remove that functionality.
4 Likes
I agree with the abovementioned issues, but as a podcaster the one that affects us the most hasn’t been mentioned:
The new system cuts off long Patron names, and I have to hover over them and wait for a text box to show up in order to read the names.
We read the names of our top contributing patrons on every episode, and some of them change their display names frequently to make jokes on our podcast to be read aloud. I’ve been sticking to the old system because I can easily read off the $10+ patrons by name, and if I have to wait for almost every patron to see their full display name, it’s going to be a slow read and a pain in the butt to edit.
I have had no issues with the old setup and no need to wander over to the new.
3 Likes
The reason I switched back to the old view, is because I export to CSV and I have formulas in Google Sheets to organize everything. Can we have an option of exporting to CSV in the same format as the old view??
The relationship manager doesn’t work normally at all. For example, I had 19 patrons who were on one of my tiers in May, but one of them deleted his pledge before he was billed in May and marked as “deleted”.
The question is “How can I message other 18 succesfully charged patrons at once using only the relationship manager interface?”
If I select “Paid” filter - only 10 patrons left for some reason. Why? The Patron manager shows that 18 people were successfully charged.
While the Relationship manager can’t be the full alternative of Patron manager - it’s not a good idea to remove it. Please keep both interfaces (I mean the old Patron manager version since new one is useless)! It will be good for all creators, not only for ones who like to use Relationship manager!!
3 Likes
The old manager is much better, please don’t axe it
10 Likes
Absolutely agree!! I need to put in a list of patrons at the top 2 tiers every week, and the old patron manager is the fastest way to get this info. The newer patron manager feels completely useless for this task. If it had a “Tier X & higher” filter, it MIGHT be more useful.
1 Like
Hello Tina, thank you for the update to the patron relationship manager. This has been one area of the interface that has confused me over the years, especially since there were several areas that were labelled similarly: ‘manager’, ‘patron manager’ and ‘relationship manager’. I’ve only recently learned to use the relationship manager properly to display who is in which tier and also who has paid, declined etc.
On a related note - I only recently learned that when somebody’s payment is declined they are automatically blocked from accessing your content. In the past I thought I had to go through and manually block these patrons - thank you for doing this automatically 
This is my first post in the community although I have been on Patreon since January 2016. Thank you for all that you guys do to help us connect with our fans and supporters!
Regards,
Bruno
GLB Productions
2 Likes
Hello Patreon team, as from 7th of July Patron Manager will become unavailable, below issues with Relationship Manager will become critical.
- (misbehaving filters) Choosing “Billed for: June” in Relationship Manager is showing 56 patrons, while Patron Manager is showing 57
- (misbehaving filters) Sorting patrons by Charged On is inconsistent. It starts from June 12th and descends till June 1st. Then it randomly lists patrons charged on 4th, 6th, 8th etc.
- (misbehaving filters) If on top of “Billed for: June” filter I add “Paid” Charged Status the list of patrons will be incorrect (34 patrons instead of expected 47). This is critical as Patreon is not sending notifications for Declined patrons (or, in some cases, for Former patrons), who’s payments got finally processed and who are expecting to get their benefits re-activated.
- (missing notifications) as I mentioned in the previous bullet point, notifications for Declined patrons (or, in some cases, for Former patrons), who’s payments got finally processed are missing (both email and, in some cases, https://www.patreon.com/notifications)
- (missing Completion Status) Lastly, I cannot how I can mark patron Complete in Relationship Manager. Is this functionality gone? I guess I can track completion through Benefits section but Benefits are also not visible in Relationship Manager.
Can you please help?
4 Likes
Hey, the changes seems really interesting, looking forward to it.
I just have one question. Would we be able to still mark as complete the patrons whom we send the rewards on a concrete month? I use this feature a lot, specially when declined patrons get processed and I don’t receive any email about it, I check the non complete patrons and I find the ones I need to send rewards to. I’m not sure this feature is listed here. And we don’t have that on the relationship manager right now, if it disappears from there, I feel lost of how to check who I already sent or not the rewards.
Thank you
4 Likes
My assumption is that it’s likely that they will expect you to do that inside the Benefits tab, instead of in patreon manager.
Do you mean even if it’s a zip of digital rewards? I’m not talking about physical benefits to track.
If there’s a way to mark it there, fine, but I feel I need to go to two places to do this. I want to check if they are “paid” to send a message, if I have to go to another tab later to mark I’ve send them a message with a zip of rewards, I feel it’s not a natural move to do.
Also as patreon doesn’t send you an email when a declined patron gets processed, I need to check who was the one who now is paid and before was declined, I can check the date, but it’s more handy for me to see the ones I didn’t mark as complete that month, and in that filter, see the new one that paid.
My opinion! Hope there’s an easy way to do this, if it’s in benefits, it’s ok, but I would love NOT to lose this feature.
Thanks
Any “benefit”(reward) that you have in a tier, digital or physical, is trackable in the benefits tab as long as it’s setup in the tier.
I dislike the benefits tab(it lacks what i need… so i use another service to track my items) but since sales tax is forcing folks to use it if they want to use the advanced features for sales tax, it’s pretty clear they are pushing the benefits tab and likely not adding “mark as complete” back in to the patron manager. Imo anyways.
1 Like
I get what do you mean! And I know Benefits tab right now is a mess (they even told us in a pop up). But right now what’s in the relationship manager + what I quickly read here as new + how the benefits tab is right now = means I need to do double effort to send rewards via message in a bulk to my patrons + then go to benefits and mark them all there ( everyone that appears in benefit tab are paid, I guess).
For me, selecting them + send message + mark complete is the actions that goes together. having these split in 2 different places (select and send // mark as complete) is quite an inconvenience in my opinion.
Thanks for the replies. I will wait for the new stuff, maybe there’s something I didn’t understand about the changes. And well, I can always do the 2 actions separately.
BTW, as I said, receiving an email when a patron that was declined gets processed would be REALLY useful to me, specially to know who is so I can go and send the rewards immediately.
Thanks
3 Likes
This.
This is a vital tool for me, and I’m being told that it isn’t possible in the new manager.
That and the ability to hover over a patron’s pledge to see what their max monthly pledge is.
Without these tools, the new patron manager’s only foreseeable purpose for me will be to download CSV files and import them into excel and then have excel do these things for us that the old patron manager did. And even then it won’t keep up to date with pledges per creation as far as I can tell.
1 Like
Seeing this makes me a little more hopeful. But until we have all the functionality that the current pages have on the new manager, why kill the current pages?
1 Like