Thanks for your response @synnesai ! I like your two-pronged approach of trying to ignore the numbers while offering exclusive benefits to get more patrons. Would you mind if I use this advice in the blog article I’m writing on this topic? I won’t be mentioning creator names, just general information to help creators deal with “the dip.”
I’m not sure if we have any videos that are specifically about helping patrons pledge, but is a good explainer video if your fans are just not sure what Patreon is. But also, that’s a good idea to create a video for patrons about pledging. I’ll send that info along to our support team.
Most of my ‘dip’ is caused by declines. So I’d like to know more about why declines happen. As well as Patreon I have quite a lot of people donating through PayPal (mainly my UK audience who want to donate in pound sterling), and in over two years I’ve had two PayPal declines. Compare that to patreon, where I get about 10 declines a month. Why the difference? I thought maybe it was overseas patrons who were more likely to get declines, but looking at the list that’s not always the case. Your thoughts on this would be really helpful.
After nearly six years of seeing it every month, I have come to terms with “the Dip” just being something that happens every month that we have no control over.
I see about a 2% to 3% dip every month on the first, and typically see 50% of that come back in the first week, and just about every month I close the month with more patrons than the month before.
The dip is a thing. But it is a thing we have to accept, just like Mondays.
(And a footnote from having worked with recurring subscription models in the past, 2-3% loss per month wouldn’t be excessive in most industries, and when at least half of those are just payment processing errors at the client end, that brings us to a 1-2% subscription loss at time of payment? Those are great numbers.)
The Dip in my patronage is mostly from declined cards. On the 1st or the 2nd, I go into the Patron Manager and look through every Decline.
(I already requested through Patreon Help that the page organize those Declines in one easy access spot so that we know which payments have been declined without combing through the list every month, but to no avail!)
I message those patrons directly and say, “Hey dear, your card was declined on Patreon this month - are things all right with you?” Most of the time, a) their card expired, or b) they got their card replaced due to identity theft / fraud and hadn’t updated it yet. They usually update it as a direct response to my private message.
Can you also echo my suggestion and suggest a section of the Income manager where we can see whose cards got declined, to make it easier to do the legwork of contacting them directly?
This lists all your patrons, sorted by status (OK, Fraud, Declined) - all the declined patrons are at the bottom of the list. Click the little box beside each decline patron, and then click the Send Message button.
That’s helpful, thank you. I tried to navigate to the same format you linked me to, without the link, through my page, but couldn’t get there. Not sure why I’m so confused by this.
Make sure you are going to “Manager” instead of “Relationship Manager” - this will bring up the old manager which shows your paid posts. At the top of that screen is a button that says “view all current patrons”
Thanks for sharing! I’ll try to do some investigating to see if I can get to the bottom of this. Not sure how much info I’ll be able to find because internal data like that can sometimes take a while to get to. But I’ll def give it a shot!
@DysonLogos, @timnash, @horizontalwithlila I’m not sure if you saw my earlier post in this thread, but I’m writing a post for the Patreon blog about the dip. Would it be okay if I possibly feature some of your advice in the post? I’m not going to be using anyone’s names, just general descriptions of the tips given. Thanks!
Firstly I try not to check the number of patrons/monthly total too often, as I know it can fluctuate. And secondly I try not to look in particular around the first of the month. I try to look at their monthly figure at the middle of each month, and keep track of how that changes as a way of assessing progress more generally.
Oh absolutely. The whole “don’t focus on the figures” thing is generally good advice to keep chill. I used to check my numbers multiple times a day. It is way healthier to do it a couple of times a month or so.
