I recently ran a Special Offer sticker in January and fulfilled it February… it was a headache. Huge time sink that ate into creative time. I am interested in running a Special Offer again because I do want to reward my Patrons, but only if the following things change first.
Please have new and existing Patrons fill out an address form exclusive to the special offer. Asking them to navigate through settings and update their mailing address confuses them, and most of them ignore it. Once my Special Offer was over and the benefit list was generated, I easily had over a 100 patrons that were missing mailing address. I had to ask my patrons to provide there mailing address via google forms, when I cross referenced the list to benefits, I noticed a lot of mailing address were out dated.
So! All I ask for is that once Special Offers go live, current patrons are emailed a form to fill out. Get the excitement and celebration going! By having this mandatory, it reduces confusion with Patrons about whether they will receive the reward or not. I can frequently notify patrons during the active promotion instead of afterwards, when they already mentally checked out. Plus, having them go on Patreon platform to submit their info brings them back to the actual website. I have many Patrons that pledge and disappear for months, hopefully all the hard work of running a special offers brings them back on the platform and increase engagement.
If not at the start of the campaign, at least provide us an option like Kickstarter where we can one click mass message our patrons for mailing address that converts nicely into a csv.
Another error I noticed was that Patrons not belonging to a reward tier do not show up in benefit. In addition, the benefit pages displaying all the patrons is glitchy and cumbersome to load.
If this is not a concern for Patreon or not on the agenda to fix, I would love to know so I can direct my attention elsewhere. Thank you!