The CSV export of member data is really handy, but as I do some analysis to look at Patron behavior over time, there are some oddities in the data. The data is correct, it’s just confusing.
For example, I have a former patron who became a Patron in April 2018, and who was last charged in Feb 2016 (more than 2 years before joining).
Obviously, what’s happening is that this person has been a patron more than once, and the CSV only contains the most recent start date (2018), but (it seems) their payments never went through that entire second support stint.
It would be really handy to have the # of payments a Patron has made, along with the total time they spent as a Patron. Also, the number of times they pledged or changed their pledge. This would make it a lot easier to make sense of the data.
I’m trying to plan higher tiers, and I’d like to look at over-givers—people who opted to give me more than my currently only tier, but there’s a lot of cleaning up to do in order to find out someone’s average payment to me. Average payment is Lifetime / payments**, or potentially **Lifetime / time-as-patron, but I don’t have data to make that calculation. (Or, if I do it naively, there’s a lot of apparent noise in the data.)
This helps me find people who have pledged more than their average for short periods, for one thing.