404 patrons going to 317. Every update since this change has been terrible, I truly cannot understand why this has been done. Milestones are useless, can’t enjoy any big round numbers anymore because they are not real.
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I guess I assume what for this was done and I can’t say it’s for creators… Sadly.
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So can these “canceled patrons” still read your content until the end of the month since they are still included in the count? I also base my goals on the number of patrons so I don’t know how I should approach it.
Yes. A Patron’s access expires at the end of the month, For active patrons, there is a three-day grace period for retries. It’s best practice (IMHO) to not post new content until the 5th.
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How about, refunded patrons?? They pledge to you on this day and then suddenly deleted the same day and you refended them. Would they still see your content??
They still have access, per Patreon’s page on refunds:
Important note : Refunding the current month’s payment will not revoke a patron’s access to your patron-only posts.
Ref: How do I refund my patron?
This is why I have ‘Pay Up Front’ and never, ever refund pledges. I point people to this specific line in the policy and tell them to take it up with Patreon.
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Oh my gosh. Now I understand. Thank you so much for then information.
This change also changed who is displayed in the Relationship Manager with the status “Declined”. Now anybody who’s last payment was declined is marked as a “Declined Patron”, even those that have since cancelled their pledge. Those patrons used to be displayed with the status “Cancelled”. Luckily there is the “Cancel Date” to see who has already cancelled, but there is no way to filter them out. Thus, it is no longer possible to message all with patrons who’s pledge was recently declined without clicking on them one by one. As somebody with thousands of patrons and hundreds of people with the “Declined” status, messaging them like this is just undoable.
Can you please do one of the following:
- Revert the change. I.e. have patrons who have cancelled their pledge, but who have their last payment status as “Declined” be listed under “Cancelled Patrons” (or “Former Patrons”).
- Make it possible to filter out these patrons, who have cancelled their pledge, but have have their last payment status as “Declined”.
- Include the “Cancel Date” column in the CSV export (then I can do the filtering myself).
It is already a bit strange that not all the information in the Relationship Manager is present in the CSV export. To me, option 3 seems like a no-brainer to do anyway. It doesn’t change anything for how Patreon uses the data, and is the least amount of work (add data that is already there to the export).
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Yes, this has been a big problem for us, too! We can no longer easily keep track of who are declined but not cancelled, as we try to message such patrons ourselves. I don’t understand at all why we would want the cancelled patrons and the declined but not cancelled ones all lumped in together. We definitely need a way to separate them!
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Hey everyone, I just want to chime in since I’ve been working for a while on a tool to help creators to get a better access to their patrons growth&numbers and to automatically send them emails when the payment is declined or when they cancel (@morepurplemorebetter and @FutilityCloset that would help you to avoid having to manually sending them emails every month, and use that time to work on your creations instead 
)
It’s also been recently accepted on the Patreon’s App Directory: https://www.patreon.com/apps/creator-metrics 
I hope that one day it won’t be needed anymore and have everything integrated in Patreon, but for the time being, if anyone is interested in giving it a try, just send me a private message and I can generate for you a coupon code to get 30 days for free.
Thanks, but an automated function wouldn’t work for us. We don’t email all our declined patrons (some have special circumstances) and some have been declined for years and we only email them a few times (rather than continuously).
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I totally agree on this one, I wouldn’t email all declined patrons every time either.
My suggestion (and what I’ve set by default) is what’s common in the industry¹: just few emails after the payment is declined and that’s all.
In the specific I’ve found by experience that 3, 7, and 14 days work the best. Just 1 email is usually not the best, like you pointed out, as some people overlook it. Also taking into consideration that Patreon already sends 1 single email after the initial payment fails (so day 0), but that’s not customizable, so without any personal touch to your patrons.
Someone also decides to set an email to be sent after 30 and/or 60 days, but I’d definitely suggest against emails after that, as then it becomes annoying.
¹ If you want to read more about it, googling for “dunning emails” would return various articles about best practices
This is a sample of how it’d look and the minimum kind of emails I’d suggest to send (automatically or not) 
Thanks! It’s always interesting and helpful to see what others are doing on this kind of thing. We’ve generally been waiting at least a couple of weeks before we email the declined patrons as some of them do fix it on their own in that time frame, so we want to give them time to get to it and not get “bothered” by us.
As I said, too, we don’t email some of the declined patrons at all, if we know they have particular circumstances that are challenging for them at the moment. And we tend to send different emails to some different declined patrons, depending on things like whether they’ve been declined previously. So an automated process wouldn’t work too well for us, but in order for us to do it ourselves, we need the Relationship Manager to work differently than it currently is (and not have the Cancelled patrons mixed in)!!
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