Editing patron address

[joumana]

I have as situation that’s recurring enough to mention, which is patrons moving but not updating their address (who can blame them, I wouldn’t remember to either) so I always double-check before sending them physical rewards, and then if they have moved, I need to ask them to update their info, which means having to send them precise instructions and links for that. It’s a bit of a hassle. And if they don’t, I have to keep their new address in my address book and remember to ignore the one in the patron manager. I don’t have that many patrons but managing this would be bewildering if I did.

Is there a way to make this process more integrated without pestering patrons? In my situation, the simplest way would be to be able to edit their info directly in my patron manager (that would be solely on my end, not their core account details), but in a way that can be overridden if they subsequently do update their details.
Another way might be to have a way to nudge them, like an email that says “So-and-so wants to send you something, is this still your address?” and they can just click yes, or be taken to their account details if they click “no, I moved”. But if someone supports multiple creators that could quickly become insane unless there is an in-built limit (for instance the nudge email is disabled if the patron has already responded in the last 6 months) and even that I’m not sure of.

Any better ideas?

[lisavollrath]

This is becoming a problem for me, as well. My patrons tend to be a little older and less tech savvy than average, so getting them to make changes to anything is like pulling teeth. I have two patrons whose addresses have changed since they signed on years ago. I know this because they participate in mail art projects, and I get their address labels sent to me—and those addresses are not the same as the one I see in the patron manager screen.

Rather than continuing to pester them to change their address, it would be great if I could update their address for them, and Patreon could send them an email saying “Lisa wants to update your address. Yes/No?”

[mindy]

Hi! Thanks for raising this, it seems like an area we could improve on for sure. I wonder if there might be an information law about changing people’s private info. Let me see if I can find more info about it!

[joumana]

I wondered, that’s why I suggested changing it on our end only or making it a one-click affair for them to do it.

[bob_artist]

Just jumping in to say this is a problem for me too. I send out personalized monthly email/snail mail letters to 120+ of my patrons, and I have (1) people who haven’t updated their addresses despite my asking, and (2) people who want to be called by a nickname on their letter instead of their legal name. I have to manually enter this data into my CSV every month. (

I like the idea of being able to input our own info (on the creator’s end only) to override the original info without actually changing the patron’s data on their end - kind of like how we’re able to put in notes about our patrons in the relationship manager, but the patron doesn’t see them. I’d also love to have a checkbox option to override/include the edited info into the patron report CSV.

[mindy]

Thanks for these thoughts!

I checked with the product team and they’ve been putting in some work to make address management easier on the patron side — we just launched the ability for patrons to update address data for all pledges at /pledges. This might be a good place for you to direct your patrons to as one final push for them to update it?

We’ve been making changes like this for the past few weeks and are hopeful that these UX changes will make the address management on the patron side much more obvious, which will in turn limit some of this frustration. But the team is also going to see if there are any opportunities for creators to have more ownership of the data and the ability to edit it directly, which is the request in here, I believe.

[frasercain]

As part of this, I just started asking Patrons for their addresses, since I’ve got some doodads to send out as random surprises. Is there a way get existing Patrons to put in their addresses?

[joumana]

Same here, that’s actually one of the reasons I brought this up. Currently you have to ask them to. The new /pledges url mentioned above may make this simpler. But I wonder if editing an older tier, to now require an address, would automatically make their address visible. Would you happen to know, @mindy ? I suspect not, for privacy reasons. It seems I’m not the only one, however, who had lower tiers that don’t require a postal address only to later realize I do want to send occasional postal rewards to those patrons as well. So, question: If you’re a patron, and a creator you support edits a tier so that it now requires an address, will that show up in /pledges? That would be very handy, especially if there’s a little “please complete your details for this creator” prompt; without that, from what I see, there wouldn’t even be an option to input it. The URL looks good in any case, and I’ll give it a shot – post about it and ask my patrons to check their details are current.
Also, do we have to enter our address separately for each creator?

[buster]

I can hop in on some of these questions.

If editing an older tier, to now require an address, would automatically make their address visible.

No, the patron needs to specifically give their address to you, so while you can make the address required, that will only make it required going forward. However, you could do this and then ask existing patrons to update their address if they want what you’re interested in sending them. I tested this out and realized that the address prompt doesn’t show up on /pledges, but if the patron edits their pledge they can add an address there. I’ve sent this feedback to the right product team as well to see if they can give a prompt to add an address in this case, as you recommended here.

As of a couple weeks ago, we started saving addresses on the patron side, so you won’t need to add it separately for each creator. That was the case for a long time, so you may remember it being that way. It’s better now!

Hope this helps.

[joumana]

Thank you for filling in the blanks!

[buster]

I let the product team know about this small oversight and they fixed it! You can now direct patrons to /pledges even if they began pledging to you before you made the address required and they will have a prompt to update their address as shown in the screenshot.

[mindy]

amazing, thank you Buster!

[joumana]

That’s brilliant, thank you!