Screen New Patrons For Eligibility Before Granting Access

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1

Hi,

I’m still very new to Patreon so this function may be available already and I’ve just not found it but I have looked hard and can’t see an way to do what I want.

I create video tutorials for both the home user and professional. The home user tutorials are free to all but the professional ones I would like only professionals to be able to access. I will have two tiers; PRO - with all tutorials including the professional ones and FREE - with just the free tutorials in. I am happy to screen new PRO Patron applicants to check their eligibility but is there a way to ‘hold’ them until I’ve done that? I don’t want it to get messy with deleting Patrons and refunding payments if I don’t get to checking them quickly enough.

Or is there another way I can achieve what I’m trying to do?

Thanks :+1:

2

There’s no way to screen Patrons.

A way to work around this though is to:

  • set the number of available slots for this tier back to 1 (if a patron cancels, their slot doesn’t become available)
  • Have an application form like forms.google.com with questions you need to screen them.
  • Pick a date/time both you and your patron are available.
  • Publish the slot when they are ready to claim it. For example: if you have 23 patrons on this tier, you’d set the number of slots to 24 and once they signed up you set it back to 1.

This is what I have been doing when I reserved slots on my limited tier for existing patrons who wanted to move up. It’s a bit of a hassle, and I cannot imagine why you’d want to limit your potential earnings like this - but I hope this works for you.

If you are looking to create a professional community, perhaps Discord can fulfil this function. In case you have never heard of it: it’s a chat server with text/voice chat channels and you can create roles with customizable accessibility. You can automatically or manually assign these roles to Patrons and give them access to hidden/private channels after you’ve screened them.

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3

Thank you Frenone for taking time to reply.

In the main, my professional users aren’t a very tech savvy community and access my tutorials only through my Youtube channel at the moment. I like Patreon and am comfortable adding it in as an extra step as, in a poll, my pro community actively preferred me to create a trade area so that more advanced techniques can be kept secret from the home user thus protecting the integrity of the professional. They all, without prompting indicated they would happily pay for that service. My YouTube channel is just a few subs away from being monetised so I hope to build a small revenue stream from that. The pro area is therefore an extra revenue stream that I will build up as well.

Given the above, I would prefer not to have to add in yet another step by requiring users to go to Discord first so I don’t think it’s a good option for me/my users, at least at the moment. I therefore think the method of restricting patrons to a tier is the best for me so I’ll give that a go.

Thank you.