Please update mailing address fields!

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I’m currently dividing almost 1000 Patron addresses into first/last name and address 1/address 2 because that’s what the VAST majority of mailing systems (including my shipping platform and the third party drop-ship postcard company I’m using to fulfill a special offer) demand. I really shouldn’t have to waste an hour doing this when it would be so easy (and SO standard!!) to simply change the Patron mailing address sign-up forms to separate first/last name and to have two lines for street addresses.

There are Excel formulas and tools that can help me with this to a degree, but as I sit here manually moving middle initials into the first name column, I just can’t stop thinking about how much easier this would be if Patreon made this extremely simple change! Anyone else?

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On the note of mailing address fields - is it possible to change Abbreviated Country Names to full written Country Names to match USPS guidelines?

https://faq.usps.com/s/article/International-addressing-requirements

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Hey has this still not been fixed? I’m having huge issues with handling address labels and I’m not even at that many Patrons. It’s really time consuming having to format address labels.

Patreon is extremely unfriendly for international Creators. I live in Sweden, but all US addresses are formatted for the US and do not include the country, so I have to manually add that in every time.

Upon exporting addresses via a .csv, it uses the country code instead of the full country name which doesn’t really work when generating address labels.

Can this be fixed? The first thread I found was from 2019 and it’s now two years later with no updates.

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You might want to email support or mention this on Discord.
https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us

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I guess I don’t understand the point of this “Patreon Feedback” forum with “feature request” tags if that is not what it’s meant to be used for. This definitely isn’t a support issue because it’s not a bug, and a Patreon tech support employee is not going to be able to change the UI for me.

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I mention it in most threads asking for help or about bugs because the staff largely doesn’t check the forums and thus never see these posts. (There have been promises to be more active here, but I’ve not noticed it yet. So until that changes, I’ll keep recommending people get help elsewhere.)

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Hello! I am Hayley, I started posting here when this forum was first made as part of Amanda Palmer’s creator team. A couple weeks ago I was hired as Patreon’s new Head of Online Community. You can read my intro and learn more about me and my community journey here, in my Welcome Thread:

Introducing Patreon’s new Head of Online Community, Hayley!

There’s MANY factors that influenced my desire to join the Patreon Community team, and I’ll be totally honest with you - as an active member who LOVES this space (there’s so much potential to connect with each other here! creator to creator, creator to Patreon etc.), I saw a lot of room for improvement, especially when Patreon’s community team was shifting - with Renya departing, I felt like there was a lot of opportunity to have someone new come into this space and help it reach it’s potential. So I threw my hat into the ring and long story short, here I am.

I’m on my third week in as part of the team, and I have been working on a lot of projects, ideas and strategies in the background, and one of the biggggggest undertakings I have right now involves this very space.

So with that: I totally hear you in your frustration, this space has been a little quiet for a little too long and that’s something that I noticed myself before I came into this role and it’s something that I want to help mend now that I am here and tasked with tending this online space. I appreciate any and all patience and understanding while I am catching up to speed in my new role, I am reading everything that’s posted here and I’m going through posts in this category veryyyyyy methodically.

As a creator myself, there’s SO MANY features and ideas that I have that I want to help make the creator experience even better and easier. And now as a team member, I am privileged to be here looking at what everyone else wants, all of your vibrant ideas and suggestions and I’ll be looking at patterns and demand and working with the full Patreon team to help get some ideas realized, some bugs fixed, and some faith restored in this community. I can’t make promises that anything will happen over night or that I can directly influence the product itself, but I am making sure that I adequately represent creator needs and keep my finger on the pulse of our community.

WITH THAT.

You can post here and in the Discord, I’m reading everything in both channels and I’m working with the team to figure out when and how more Patreon team members can come into these spaces to see what the chatter is and respond in the areas of expertise.

For bug reports and support inquiries related to your personal account, payments or specific patron behavior, the Community Happiness team, our support team are always the best experts to reach out to directly: Submit a request – Patreon Help Center

For product and feature ideas, keep them coming. I’d recommend starting new threads with new ideas, rather than adding on to some of these longggggg old threads as new threads can not only be easier to parse through, but they can also inspire other creators to easily +1 an idea and share how it’s worked for them in their experience.

Head on over to my welcome thread (linked above) if you’d like to ask me any questions personally, and in the mean time, I am working diligently to help improve these spaces and our creator community’s experience using them. There’s a lot of work ahead, big things can’t happen over night, but I’m committed to do the best I possibly can to represent your needs, requests and ideas, to advocate for you to the internal Patreon team, and knock my head together with the Community and Education team specifically, to make this space more functional.

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Hi there,

Following up here with a quick update: Currently we don’t have plans to change the input format of patron addresses, there are restrictions from pre-existing database structure. There are workarounds you can use to separate the fields automatically in the CSV download using the “Split Cell” function, hopefully this can save you some time. Hope this helps!

Brian

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I’m gonna be honest, Brian, this is not great to hear. As I mentioned in my initial post, “split cell” and other related functions really struggle with things like middle initials/middle names and two-part first names (like Mary Kate), so it still results in a lot of manual labor. For a creator like me with literally 1500+ Patrons, these “workarounds” are just wasted time and energy that ultimately result in me just… ceasing to do any promotion or reward that requires mailing.

I REALLY hope that your team reconsiders the decision to just let this sit. I’m sure it’s a huge pain that your existing structure would need to change, but quite frankly, LOTS of Patreon needs to change, and feeling stuck in the current UI is not going to help anyone.

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This very much sounds like “this is a lot of work and we don’t want to do it”. To rephrase your response - there are workarounds for your database that would allow this (i.e add new fields and if they are blank, do not use them, reminding users to update their information into the new fields, and blanking the old fields after). It’s fairly simple logic for changing from v1 of a form/schema to v2.

This should be done on the database side so that creators who fulfill outside Patreon don’t have to do a ton of extra work.

This is in the same category as not sending notifications when a user cancels AND deleting their historical records, leaving those of us who fulfill outside Patreon with the necessity of comparing spredsheets every single time we fulfill (which is twice per week for me with sync.com because none of the requested updates to the interface at Patreon have been made, despite multiple requests from multiple creators over the past several years).

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