I’d use it as a patron-only user manual. Go to patreon.enkiel.codes, login with accounts, tada! Benefits. And also have a descriptive list of benefits across my bots
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Hi @JordanB! Could you elaborate on this statement a bit more? What might you be taking for granted?
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Sorry for lack of clarity!
I think we take for granted that our Patrons understand how patreon actually works. Once they are patrons, we don’t usually have to answer questions about basic patreon functionality, but I realized in saying that before that our patrons may not actually know everything there is to know about Patreon!
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Hi Kristine,
Regarding the post feed, here is my suggestion for Pinned Posts. Very simple, but very useful. It would allow us to keep long-term / evergreen posts at the top of the feed. We would use it for an index for all of the posts on a given topic. We assign a tag to all the related posts (e.g. Tutorials), and assign the same tag to a post which has an index to all the other posts. I would imagine there are lots of creators with this use case.
Cheers,
Andrew
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Yes, I share many of my locked posts on fbook, twitter and even Discord (I have a public server, with most channels as patron-only). Having a pretty image I could use to entice, rather than just the text, would be amazeballs!
It would be specific to my membership, with a part of it intro-ing Patreon. Off the top of my head: Patreon is home of Nateives Records, a creative label supporting Nate in vulnerably inspiring hope and upliftment through songs, podcast, stories and livestreams, to bring more light into the world. (or something like that, hah 
)
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PS: bit of a mouthful, but it really was just off the top of me brain
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Hi Andrew! Thanks for sharing. I can see how this would be useful for your existing patrons. I’m curious if you would create the pinned post as a public post so that non-patrons could also view it?
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Hi Kristine. You can check out my post, but my idea is that you add a flag on the post - pinned - true or false - defaulting to false to maintain the existing functionality. If the post is marked as pinned, then it is listed above posts which are not marked as pinned. All other functionality stays the same - public, patron only, tier, and tags / filtering. You can also keep the reverse-chronological ordering. The only change is that pinned posts (if any) come before non-pinned posts.
Hope that makes sense! Thanks for reading.
Andrew
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Thanks for the quick reply, Andrew! The functionality you’re requesting makes sense, but I’m trying to understand who this use case is for: existing patrons or non-patrons. Would you want to use the pinned post to show non-patrons the types of benefits that they’re missing out on by not joining?
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Both. As an example: We produce Tutorial videos, which we make available to Patrons from $5 upwards. Each Tutorial video is in a post, clearly only accessible to $5 plus Patrons, and tagged with “Tutorial”. We also have Tutorial as one of our Featured Tags, so they can filter to the Tutorial posts easily. But we now have around 40 Tutorial posts. Scrolling through is inconvenient because there are so many posts. I don’t think there is any search functionality, and that would not be ideal anyway. So I created a new “Tutorial Index” post, which contains a list of the individual Tutorial names, with links to the individual posts. The Tutorial Index post is also tagged with the Tutorial tag, so it shows up when they filter on Tutorials. Now the Patrons can look at the list and easily find and jump to the Tutorial they are interested in.
The problem is that the Tutorial Index post will “fall down” the list of posts as new Tutorial posts are added. That is the problem that would be solved by the “Pinned Post” feature.
As it happens, the Tutorial Index post is public, whereas the individual Tutorial posts are Patron-only. As you suggest, this gives non-Patrons an idea of what they are missing out on.
You can check it out by going to Fruity Knitting, filtered to Tutorial. As you’ll see, the Index has already fallen down to be the second post, and that will get worse over time.
We could delete the Index and create a new one every time we release a new Tutorial, but that is extra work, and it would send out an additional notification which would just be irritating. (There’s another feature request - no notification option for a new post. I know it’s already available for updates.)
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This is super helpful! Thanks so much for the detailed response, Andrew! 
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- How do you want to communicate to fans the types of benefits that you offer, so that they understand what they get when they pledge?
- Is the current post feed with public and locked posts effective?
So far it looks like the Patron-only listings are working, since The Modern Maker is trying to replicate the Artist/Benefactor relationship we’ve seen in history (and it’s relvant to us since we’re all about historical garments). We saw an uptick in Patreon subscribers after putting up an FAQ about what our Patreon does and having a section thanking our patrons for their contributions.
- Would you want to share patron testimonials with fans?
I’m currently in the process of creating a ‘testimonials’ page on the website, since it’s common for small tailoring businesses to have one. It’s a true saying that Word of Mouth can get you the best returning customers, and that’s what Patrons are in the long run.
- If you do, how would you gather them and decide which ones to show?
Our FAQ shows what we do and who we thank, though we’re also doing our best to be GDPR compliant and we want to respect our patron’s and client’s privacy as much as possible.
- If you had a magic wand, how would you explain your Patreon and membership to your fans who are not yet patrons?
- Would it be different than how you explain it to your patrons?
I’d love to make a teaser reel for the Patreon page, but that’s going to take time, labor, and captial we just don’t have yet.
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This may be a bit left-field, but personally I’d love the ability to hook our reward tiers into our website in a column or as a dropdown menu somehow. A number of our charity’s supporters don’t understand or aren’t aware of Patreon, and we’d love to streamline the process where those visiting our website could click on a “claim this reward” button for each tier and be brought immediately to the join/pledge process. We love how there’s Patreon integration with Wordpress which we’re hoping to take advantage of sometime soon, but I think expanding that kind of functionality and giving us more off-platform options to bring fans into Patreon subscriptions with fewer clicks would help.
That doesn’t sound like a bad idea, linking directly to tier signup, but I think the design would need to handle possible confusion because the uninitiated would be met immediately with a Patreon signup prompt instead of a page about the thing they wanted. At least having landed on a Patreon page there is clear signalling that the user is someplace else before they do anything.
FWIW the information required is readily accessible via the Patreon API, and I agree that could be handy 
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Hi, i would love if there would be a place where you can see as a fan what kind of content is already on the feed, me for instance i did 17 webinars that are directly viewable if someone will sign up and i think it would be great if there would be like a chart where it says how many content of a certain kind is instantly accessable when signing up.
i get alot of feedback that new people would love to connect on the community tab with other patreons… and they are not really happy with how it is right now…
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Thanks @js1
It sounds like some sort of high level summary of the amount of content available would be helpful. Are your fans already familiar with the quality of your content, or do you think there’s a way for your Patreon public page to showcase that as well?
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Hi Ursula, yes some kind of overview what is there, i think it would be great to see visually or via numbers how much content is there and where to find what instead of the featured tags which are not really visible on mobile…
alot of new patreons realize only AFTER signing up what is already there and which features patreon has…
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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Exit Survey Improvements
How do you want to communicate to fans the types of benefits that you offer, so that they understand what they get when they pledge?
Is the current post feed with public and locked posts effective?
As someone who uses patreon primarily as a payment processor and delivers rewards off-site, it would be nice if there was a more obvious way to direct patrons to our website when they’re looking for their rewards.
Maybe add a Access Rewards tab in the current list of ‘Overview, Posts, Community’? And that button could link to a URL of our choosing, or just include some arbitrary creator-defined html/markdown?
Would you want to share patron testimonials with fans?
If you do, how would you gather them and decide which ones to show?
Testimonials can be useful, but I don’t know that a system needs to be written for this when you can just include this as part of your project page. (I already do this on my own website.)
If this does get added, please make sure creators can opt-in or curate these. Online review culture can really be the death of creative expression.
EDIT: And also just to add, obviously being able to post NSFW content publicly on Patreon pages would be useful to NSFW projects, instead of the current requirements around it being locked to active backers.
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I am excited that the website is getting an overhaul. I have had issues with patrons leaving because of search problems.
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I actually started currently using patreon as a “tip jar” (with only 1$ tier and 20$ for those who want physical prints), and I explain to my fans that Patreon is a way for them to support the creations I make on a monthly basis. I also mention that they don’t have to pledge and 99% of my (new) content is free for all. I write this all in my page’s description:
When I livestream, I tell my viewer that if they would like to support me they can head over to my patreon page (and I have a command that sends the link in the chat). If someone asks what’s Patreon, I explain in live.
For the merch tier I put more details in the tier info and link to a catalog they can choose from:
Since most of my posts are public, I can’t really vouch for effectiveness of locked posts. I also think it’s hard to know if a user pledged because of a certain locked post or just because they wanted to support you (just putting it here - it would be awesome to get notified if you got a new patron because they landed on a certain locked post)
I guess so? I have a few customers from conventions send me photos of my art prints hung up. I think it would be cool to do something like that for patrons who received merch from me as well.
Also @thelatestkate’s idea of surveying long-time patrons is awesome! Probably would steal that idea 
Honestly, I would love to some day find the time (and skills) to make a proper intro video explaining how patreon works and how my page works, I think those do wonders! I would probably explain it the same as I do now though.
I hope this is somewhat helpful 
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