The problem isn’t with the poll itself. I think (but please correct me if I’m wrong) what you want, what I want too, is for Patreon to involve us creators in the early stages of their decisionmaking process. Not have them wait until the solution is already thoroughly tested and close to being adopted, without creator feedback. We want to understand their challenges, insights that may inform their decisions, and yes of course we also want to know which solutions are being explored…
But with this example of anniversary billing - the unfortunate miscommunication made it seem like they are at the last stage, while they are (should be) still exploring many different solutions.
Polling people at the wrong time (too early in the process) creates expectations and it leads to (poorly informed) assumptions. Just look at the current PR disaster. Running a useful poll is harder than “just running a poll”. Every step that falls somewhere between acknowledging a problem exists / being presented with a challenge and implementing a solution, has different questions / tests and even different sample sizes.
My perception regarding different currencies changed over time, from great to not so great, to kinda good I suppose, to it really doesn’t make a huge difference, but it does make things a little easier.
You don’t want people to riot when you are still exploring options. You don’t want to cause a riot by involving them too late either.
Right now anniversary billing should be explored as one of many possible solutions, not be presented as THE solution. Patreon would do well to inform us about the challenges they’re trying to solve. Perhaps this might even be something we’re experiencing ourselves - who knows? People who sign up later into the month are 67% more likely to drop, WHY? What can we do to retain these patrons?
I understand what you say. And this is what I had in mind - when an idea pops up in the Patreon leaderboard that they think might end up as to be implemented to the site, instead of doing all the work with tests and doing the tests and polling with a few people they should just put the idea on the table before they start working it out. It would save a lot of time and energy.
I’m not sure whether I explain it well. What I mean is a poll like this: "Hey guys we at Patreon have an idea. Here it is. Then follows what the idea is about. And then let the creators and patrons (if patrons have to be involved in this idea) decide through a simple yes or no whether they want the described feature or not. It would really make work easier for all. Polling about an idea before it is going to be worked on in depth.
Just imagine they would ask this question, how are you gonna make sure people understand what this idea entails? The challenge is not in asking the question, it’s asking the right question at the right time. Researchers often accidentally ask the wrong question, measuring the wrong thing.
Example:
We’re considering to offer anniversary billing as an optional billing method for creators. Do you want this?
“No” can mean I don’t want this for myself, but I’m fine with others using it. It could mean I don’t want this at all because it might confuse patrons or increase payment processing fees. Or it could mean I don’t understand what anniversary billing entails so to be safe I’m gonna vote against any changes, because I want more information.
Now, if Patreon were to explore options, run some small scale tests and share the results by framing the question like this:
If we were to implement a third option to our billing system that is proven to increase retention by (making this up) 40%, how likely are you to use this feature on a scale from 1 (highly unlikely) to 5 (extremely likely)?
Both questions measure completely different things. What question you ask, and when, and how you measure the response, gives different results. It’s really not that easy, unfortunately.
I see we are on the same page here. You are right about asking the right question at the right time. You mention that people might not understand it, but that would totally be on Patreon if they didn’t explain to the fullest what the change might bring. So if they said “We’re considering to offer anniversary billing as an optional billing method for creators. Do you want this?” then it would not be enough without the explanation what it can do. My point is, tell about a change, roll out the complete information, and then ask the question. A simple yes or no would be enough as answer.
I admit though that a test with a small group would have more weight because then they would be able to offer numbers. There is a “but” though. If they had 5 percent of people doing the test, and they are so satisfied, it doesn’t mean that the remaining 95 percent feel the same. It may happen that on the basis of those 5 percent a change will be made that the majority of creators and patrons later will be unhappy with.
So I would be more like don’t do tests. Just let explain Patreon what they want, which chances and risks there might be (in an understandable way), and then run the poll.
That’s how I would do it. Everybody would be informed, nobody would feel left out, and the majority decides.
Another way would be doing the change after the poll but let the creators have the option whether they want to use the change or stick with the old system if that was possible.
Your argument about the 5% not being a representative sample can easily be countered by following the scientific method. Which is what I’d expect Patreon to do. The sample has to be random & large enough in order for the findings to be statistically significant (meaning results are unlikely attributed to chance).
I do think actual (scientific) findings, not assumptions/speculation, are necessary to make better informed decisions. You simply cannot know the effect of a change until you test and measure it.
I don’t consider myself a ‘small creator’ and having been here since 2014 I’m honestly tired of the amount of times sweeping changes are made by consulting about three people.
Firstly, how and when we bill OUR patrons should OUR decision. We can choose to charge in advance or not. It’s not that hard to give us the OPTION to move to anniversary billing.
Second, despite being here seven years I have NEVER ONCE been a part of ANY survey. If you want truly representative sampling you need to use a random selection. Not the same 5% you ask every other time.
Third, would it be too much for you to remember that many of us are not part timers but reliant on this income. Many of us have set bills and direct debits ourselves that go out on the first of the month. Bad enough we have to wait a week to get paid in full.
Finally, you do realise you implemented polling quite some time ago and could actually ask most of not all creators about these changes? It’s pretty simple to use. You just create a simple poll with yes/no options, or you give a more fleshed out version and then give 3-5 options. Works great.
You’re really not doing yourself any favours. You used to be the only company offering this model, but you’re not any more. Maybe it’s time you took notice of how many options the competition has.
Cool, so the live “hangout” wasn’t announced via any sort of email, and I missed it. I know it was announced in the discord, but A. I personally keep large discord servers muted because otherwise the notifications drive me up the wall and B. only a very small percentage of the community knows about the discord anyway, so it’s not super fair to only announce it there. I found out through twitter again that this had happened, too late.
Hey staff? You have all our email addresses. People should not have to stumble accidentally into communication with you. I’ve looked all over the main site and I don’t know how anyone is even supposed to find out about the forum or the Discord. The only reason I found out what was happening, made it to this forum and found the discord was because of other Creators on twitter sharing links.
It’s already pretty clear to me that nothing was learned and nothing is changing. You only responded to the outcry publicly when you couldn’t ignore it, and now you’re going right back to keeping everything obscured so you don’t have to listen to too many opinions. Disappointing but predictable.
I don’t expect to be consulted on every change… but as someone who manages more than one patreon, I should not have heard about anniversary billing via angry twitter threads. And I sure in the heck shouldn’t have found out about the creator-only forum and discords because other creators posted links to where ‘discussion’ was happening, because there wasn’t transparency happening.
A banner on the Patreon website that only shows up for creators, when we visit the site or app, would be a GREAT way to communicate these important events!
Because even if you did have notifications enabled on Discord there was no @everyone tag, only a pinned message.