Okay so I recently deleted a tier from my Patreon due to it being more work than I had expected it would be. Unfortunately this has sent all the patrons I had into the “pledge with no reward” tier of my Patreon with the pledged amount from the deleted tier as their default.
I think it would be a better idea to have them default down to the Tier below the deleted Tier at that pledge amount. As it is I’ll likely need to go in and refund their pledges when they notice whats up.
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This i actually understand why it’s likely done this way. What if the tier below/above/other tiers in general are content the pledger doesn’t want. What if the other tiers are capped to a max of X people for that tier? Adding the deleted tier people to it wouldn’t work. What if it requires a mailing address and the person doesn’t want to give it since they didn’t voluntarily choose that tier? What if it is a commission tier and they simply don’t want it or don’t have a character/subject matter for it? It’d be putting a lot of stress on both sides just to try to come up with a compromise for a tier they didn’t choose. (Not that it’s any better to be set as “no reward”.)
From a patron and creator perspective, I think what patreon needs to do is to make sure there are automated emails that get sent to people that have had their tiers deleted and actually inform them it has happened and that currently they have “no reward”. As of yet, neither myself nor any of my pledgers whom have had this happen have ever received such a notification outside of if the creator themselves notifies people of changes/PM’s people directly (which i’ve had to do since patreon doesn’t have an alternative) and creators don’t get a notification or see any info about how deleting a tier is handled either.
I’ve had to hound people to get them to change their tier rewards after a reward deletion and it is SUCH a pain in the butt. If people have my specific patreon notifications turned off (or PM emails turned off) or what have you, they never get it. It should be a mandatory automated email from patreon that people get when they have been moved to a “no reward” setup after something has been deleted. That way, unless the person has patreon emails blocked or set as spam, they will actually get it no matter what and be prompted to change. (Creators should also have a button in the back end to send out a reminder to a no reward person this way, in my opinion.) I’ve previously removed people from my patreon after 2 months if they don’t change/contact me but at this point, i’ve let it just happen because honestly, i’m not their mother. I have notices all around my patreon project saying to have email notifications on to get the most out of it and beyond that, i’m not going to hound people because it shouldn’t be my job to manage their pledges for them if they can’t take time out once in a 30 day period to check up on their money. Depending on how big a project is, there is little luck trying to manage all that.
I do my best to compromise and do something if they randomly come back and are trying to figure out whats up (like, i’m not heartless, people have bad life shit happen all the time.) But many people who miss a month don’t seem to care and just go “oh well, thats my bad” and just continue from there and rarely ask me for the previous months stuff if they didn’t answer my gazillion PM’s/Blog posts about changes.
I made the same mistake early on. Just send a private message to the patrons who are now rewardless, and let them know their previous reward has been retired. Invite them to choose any of the remaining rewards next time they visit the site—and maybe tell them you’ll send them some little something in the mail when they do.
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Very interesting points there, and I see the problem. Not really a good way to do this at the current time I suppose.
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Yes I did do that, I’m just hoping they’ll notice it.
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Making changes to reward tiers is definitely a theme we’ve heard in our research! I wanted to jump in here to let you know we have a team that’s entirely dedicated to the rewards experience. While they’re working on tackling the problem of “who is owed what by when” right now, I know that they’re also thinking about how to make modifying / versioning tiers an easier reality in the future. It’ll probably be some time before they’re able to get to that point, but in the meantime I’ll make sure they see this discussion!
eb
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