Today we’re introducing a shiny NEW way to manage and track the wonderful stuff you deliver to your patrons. 
This means less time on spreadsheets and more time to do what you do best — create.
Find all the deets here and please leave any questions, feedback, or thoughts below 
So, uh… at first this sounds great.
BUT…
Your list to mark things delivered is not in alphabetical order (please, give us at least this one luxury!), nor does it display the full list so we cannot search it either, nor does it contain even a basic search tool. So it’s neat but 90% useless.
I really hope there are plans to incorporate this with the main patron list in the future. I was stoked, until I tried using it.
Hi! There are definitely plans to improve this! One option now is to download the list as a CSV but adding sorting and search to this list makes a lot of sense! We’re actively listening to feedback like this and have time post-launch to make improvements. Tell us in as much detail as you can what would make this more useful for you. We’re listening.
First and foremost, have it listable by tier subscription or alphabetical.
Second, a “show all” instead of page by page.
Third, don’t make the rewarded patrons disappear, keep them showing and mark them as rewarded somehow?
Awesome!
But please, make a multiple selection of those patrons to send PMs to, and mark multiple as complete.
From the previews, it doesn’t seem available yet.
Way to go!
Exciting times, interested to test it out and see how it shifts my experience of rewards on Patreon
Thank you for this! If you have a moment, could you send me a screenshot of your benefit tracker page? I’d love to get a better sense of how many items are on the list. But I think I do get the gist of your feedback… you’d like to have a single page that lists all of the people who need (or have received) a specific benefit, because that will be easier to manage and keep track of everything on. Is that right?
I only have 3 tracked items at present. I was going through it the other day to use it when it first came out, to make good use of separating people by name, but since the list was non-alphabetical and paginated, it wasn’t going to work.
Ideally, for starters, add a button to “show all.” That way we can search by name at least.
Basically, take the plain old original patron list and let us mark them as having received a given reward for the month.
Really like this concept (though getting the reward/benefit listed in the initial you have a new patron email would be really nice–shouldn’t have to log in to know I have something to do) and have started using it.
I just had a new patron come in at a tier that requires a physical reward. They used a pseudonym for their account name and their real name is listed with their address in the Patron Manager, but only the pseudonym and address is in Benefits (both the screen and CSV). Can we get the mailing address name field added too?
Interesting! I didn’t run across this issue in our testing… I’ll look into it and see what we can do. Thanks for the feedback, Neil!
Good idea. Would really love to see an added function to account for accumulated months. All my rewards are earned over time (e.g. 6 months @ $5 support gets you a T-Shirt, 3 months @ $25 support gets you a special DVD).
Yes! This is definitely something we’re planning to support as well! In the meantime you can use a generic “1-time” benefit and use that to track their time on the tier and deliver things as they pass various thresholds. But a more seamless solution will come eventually.
Benefits page doesn’t seem to organize things by month but just slaps every month together under the same tier and while it does say what months its from, it gets confusing rather fast if you have stuff that is accumulated over time or if items didn’t get complete before the end of the month due to whatever reason, like communication lag times between both sides or what have you. It would be nice to be able to organize it, separate it by month or something, a little better so it doesn’t become just a giant pain in the butt list you can’t search through with ease or just become intimidating. (I can only imagine how people with much more patrons than I are dealing with this.)
Also the option to turn it off, would be super. Right now, I’d rather use my Trello as i have much more control over my lists and items but Benefits still keep showing up and showing me i have items, which is rather annoying if I’m not using it right now. It’s just going to accumulate a giant list over the time i’m not using it. However i dont want to go through and remove all the benefits i added to each tier because i’d like to come back and try it again when it’s been updated in the future.
Agreed. Adding it in on the plain regular list of patrons every month was what i was expecting as that, if memory serves, was actually something we had waaaaaaaaay waaaaaay back when. Though even back then i remember preferring Trello to the patreon functionality for that. It’d be nice to see that return so we aren’t hopping around so many areas of the site for things that could really just be added to the monthly list.
UPDATE: Okay so… we DO still have the ability to mark patrons off as completed in the monthly charges posts… So this Benefits thing is now even more confusing to me. Imo the benefits should just be a further expansion of that completed list on the month by month patron paid post list, not its own completely separate thing. Why would someone mark off all the benefits and then hop back over to the monthly feed to mark off the person there? (I’ve ignored that functionality for so long in favour of my Trello so i totally forgot it was there.)
FYI @buster, when I have a new patron sign up, I get a dot on the Benefits word on the sidebar. When I click, I see a list of my rewards. The monthly ones say “1 due” and the one-time ones say “2 due”. When I click through to the one-time ones (which say “2 due”) there is only one entry there, for the one new patron. If I click back to “Benefits”, it still shows “2 due”. Not sure what’s wrong with the math on the one-time benefits, but it’s happened multiple times (e.g. it’s not just a fluke).
@ammulder Strange! Can you send me some screenshots? I will investigate this. Thanks for reporting it!
@Temrin Thank you for this feedback. Yes, this is a bit duplicative of the “mark complete” functionality in the old patron manager, and is eventually meant to replace it. The reason we’ve moved away from the monthly model is because there are many different types of benefits people want to track, and not all of them are monthly. For example, saying “thank you” to new patrons is something you only need to do once. But you may want to bulk message all active patrons with a monthly discount code to a shop. The new benefit tracker lets you do both of these, and will continue to expand to cover more use cases (for example, a benefit that you get after being a patron for 3 months, or a benefit that is fulfilled by a 3rd party app, etc). We are definitely not done with this feature, so please do send any and all feedback you have about how we can make it more useful for you.
I’m totally down for all then other features being added and look forward to them, especially over time benefits. That is huge once it’s available. However it would still be nice to organize them by pay period. Many of us still do content monthly or need to organize each pay period separately for a variety of reasons and it makes things easier to organize when you can break it down by said pay period. As I said, having them all bunched together can get quite confusing and overwhelming. At this point I’ve completely removed all my benefits from my tiers and have gone back to my Trello because I can organize stuff by pay period and add notes to each individual monthly benefit I need to fill. With everything bunched together it’s just a royal pain trying to navigate everything. Especially when you’ve got something outstanding from a previous month for example a patron not responding quickly to get their content and it loops to the next pay period. It’s now lumped in with everything else when if it’s from a previous pay period it should get special attention to get it completed. I’m not going to manage a Trello and a benefit thing on patreon when one have significantly better organization than the other. People manage their content is so mamyndifferent ways on patreon so I feel there needs to be options. Different ways to organize benefits is a must imo. I can’t be the only one that has an easier time with smaller chunks to look at. XD
I had the wrong count on the benefits summary screen again today, so I PM’d screen shots.
