How Do You Mass Message Rewards To Patrons

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Hey all! My name is Lety and I’ve been a patron for four years now and a Patreon creator for the past two years!

I just wanted to share an issue that I’ve been having since August and see if anyone else has been having the same problem, and if so, how did you guys get around it.

In short, myself and dozens of other creators have been able to mass message patrons since late August. We have not been able to select patrons by month and tier, something that used to be doable from the patron manager and is still more or less shown as being doable.

In the patron manager, you can select which month’s patrons you want to contact, and which tier of that month’s patrons you want to contact. This is a very important feature for me as a creator as it’s what enables me to be able to send out rewards privately without having them automatically cached by third-party sites like Yiff Party, which has built a really robust platform for automatically ripping content from behind Patreon’s pay wall.

In short it looks like if a patron who had previously pledged to me deletes their Patreon account, that account becomes unmessageable. If I attempt to mass message a tier they used to be in through the Patreon manager, the entire message becomes unsendable due to the fact that single user cannot be contacted, and so-- I have not been able to send rewards to my patrons.

This is a huge issue to me because I have patrons from several months ago still asking me for rewards, and I just don’t have the manpower to hit everyone up individually. And I’ve been working with Patreon support trying to get fixed for months now, and just this week they got back to me saying they understand the problem but have no timeline whatsoever for getting it fixed.

I’m four months into this problem and still have no way of delivering rewards to my patrons. I’ve already tried messaging each of my 3000 patrons individually to sort out the ones that were unmessageable, and manually sorting those out. However, after 4 hours of efforts and finally getting a “safe” messaging list, I found myself unable to send messages again due to someone else on that list suddenly deactivating their accounts, making everyone unmessageable until I sort through all 3000 patrons again.

And so, I figured I’d reach out to the creator community and ask if any of you have had this problem, and if so, how did you guys get around it?

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Hi @LetyDoesStuff, thanks for making this post.

Firstly, I’m so sorry this problem has prevented you for messaging your patrons. I can confirm this is a known bug are team is aware of - disabled patrons continue to be visible in the Patron Manager for previous billing cycles. There are filters you can apply that will limit the number of patrons they mass message, for example by tier, membership type, pledge amount, but filtering by date isn’t one of those options.

Secondly, our suggestion is that you use Patreon Relationship Manager to message benefits to your patrons. I understand this is not ideal because PRM doesn’t have the option to sort by billing cycle in the PRM. This is feedback we have provided to the team as well. This help article has some more information about how you can do that.

Let me know if you have any more questions and I hope this helps you contact your patrons.

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Hey Mindy! Thanks so much for your response! Totally made my day just hearing from you.

If this is a known bug that the team is aware of, can you guys please make a public announcement saying as much? Telling my patrons and the tens of thousands of other patrons who are affected by this that it is not the fault of the creators that they can’t receive their rewards? Maybe provide an ETA for when this would be fixed

Month after month I’ve received angry messages and threats about how I’m being greedy and not delivering rewards, when it’s not my fault that this feature that has existed for years on Patreon has suddenly decided to stop working.

The Relationship Manager does not work. I cannot send rewards to patrons from August, a good chunk of them don’t pledge to me anymore. The angry ones emailing me and messaging me every other day, specifically. How do I contact those from August, September, and October?

I was hoping for some input from the community on how to get around this problem, but if Patreon’s aware of this problem, then I’d highly prefer an official announcement instead cause I’ve contacted no less than 1000 individual patrons about this problem now and there’s still no end to this in sight.

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I’m going to send you a DM so we can continue discussing how to solve this for you as I think PRM should work for you but I need to learn more about your rewards first. Sending now!

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Actually, that is what I would expect. If I delete my account here, I wouldn’t want to receive any other emails. Not from creators or Patreon itself. It ends the relationship and further messages could even be seen as a breach of privacy laws.
But you are saying people delete their account and still expect you deliver perks to them?

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I should have clarified. The expected behavior is that when I try to mass message patrons through the Patron Manager, it should send a message to all possible patrons.

Currently, it doesn’t do that, because it’s counting deleted patrons. Let’s say Tom was a patron of mine for half a year, had some financial problems, and entirely deleted his account in September.

When I try messaging patrons of August 2018, it gives me an error. “Sorry, but you can no longer contact this person”. It tries sending a message, but sees that Tom is on the list and shouldn’t be able to receive a message, and therefore it just cancels the entire message. Nobody will receive that message.

There is no visible marker in the manager indicating to me that Tom has deleted his account, and there’s no public API for me to access and find this info and flag it myself. The only way for me to find Tom is to systematically message all 2000 patrons I had in August, one by one, until I get that error from Tom. Then I toss him into my “Completed” list to separate him and keep going, cause there isn’t just one Tom.

I’ve done this multiple times and its consumed an entire day of my life. And even then solution was only temporary cause someone later that day deleted their account, making my list useless again, unless I go through and hit everyone up one more time and find the new Tom.

I’m not trying to hit up patrons who deleted their accounts, nor am I asking Patreon to reach out to users who terminated their relationship with the platform. I just want to hit up my August patrons to send them what they helped create.

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I see. Yeah, that would be a bug that needs fixing.

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Update: I’m happy to report this bug is now fixed! Please let me know if anything still isn’t working as it should.

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Hey Mindy! I’ve confirmed with about a dozen creators at this point that the issue seems to be fully resolved! Thanks so much for getting on this for us.

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