Rewards, Neighborhood, and Communication: How These Three Creators Use the Patreon Discord Integration

1000’s of creators on Patreon use the Patreon Discord integration to foster group and dole out rewards to their supporters.

Discord is an app initially created for gaming communities as a manner for people with related pursuits to speak in designated, related channels. Customers can work together utilizing textual content, pictures, movies, voice, and emojis.

Any Discord consumer can create personal channels, then add and take away people as desired. However for a lot of creators, manually including and eradicating patrons based mostly on their reward tier is simply too time-consuming. The mixing with Patreon implies that patrons are robotically given or denied entry based mostly on the standing of their patronage. On this manner, entry to Discord channels based mostly on patronage is an easy approach to improve reward tiers.

For this text, we spoke to representatives from World Anvil, Kitten Academy, and Printable Heroes to discover how they’re utilizing Discord to construct up their communities and reward patrons for his or her assist.

Notice: Wish to earn recurring, predictable assist out of your largest followers? Attempt Patreon.

A Notice on Roles

Anybody who desires to make use of the Patreon Discord integration will have to be accustomed to “roles.”

Roles permit you to group your patrons and followers in keeping with no matter metric you fancy. For instance, World Anvil (featured under) arrange the next roles for his or her followers and patrons:

The username of somebody with a particular position will seem color-coded in keeping with that position. Within the World Anvil instance, followers who’re not patrons have their usernames seem white. Patrons get coloured names and are grouped by assist tier. For instance, “Legendary Worldsmiths,” who pledge $50+/month, have their usernames highlighted in scorching pink.

Establishing roles to your patrons is an easy however vital step to assist Patreon’s Discord bot robotically handle any particular entry you give your patrons. For extra on how to try this, go to this text on find out how to combine Patreon and Discord.

Now, let’s check out how three creators are utilizing Discord along with organising roles.

World Anvil: Making a Area for Different Creators

Dimitris and Janet are the creators of World Anvil, a worldbuilding platform for authors and recreation masters alike. The platform presents customers a approach to simply retailer, crosslink, and reference their maps and different details about characters or gamers and the world they’ve imagined. It’s additionally a spot the place customers can interact with content material creators to offer suggestions and work together with the world being constructed.

Their patrons are worldbuilders: authors and recreation masters and different artistic individuals who signal as much as obtain updates, voting rights on new options, and naturally, Discord rewards.

Dimitris shared that “Guild Members” (i.e., patrons) get entry to:

• channels with distinctive content material
• discussions on closed options
• closed-door audio chats on the server
• channels with insights concerning the creators’ day by day lives and the event of the instrument they’re constructing, and
• Guild-only challenges and writing workshops.

That’s along with color-coded roles and further customer support.

The husband-and-wife staff has been utilizing Discord to dole out Patreon rewards for roughly one yr. Their success on the platform in that brief time attracted the eye of different creators; the pair at the moment advises 4 different Patreon creators on find out how to develop their communities.

“Discord for us is a approach to empower our group. We think about our Patrons to be household. It’s been an amazing alternative to get actual insights on what our largest followers wish to see, which, mixed with the flexibility to construct hype round our product, has been a blessing,” Dimitris shared.

Not solely do they embrace the group dynamic Discord facilitates with their followers and patrons, however additionally they realized that being on Discord “introduced us nearer to different influencers, which helped us develop additional away from our preliminary echo chamber,” he mentioned.

“We’re very pleased that we delivered to Patreon over ten new creators by giving them the boldness to get on the market and present their work, which is superior,” he added.

Kitten Academy: Coordinating Kitten Rescues

Kitten Academy is a spot “the place kittens study to cat.” The volunteers who run Kitten Academy work with a no-kill shelter, On Angel’s Wings, to rescue pregnant cats and their litters.

“We’ve specialised in taking in momcats who come into the shelter already pregnant, giving them a protected place to ship their kittens, getting all of them as much as an applicable age and having the mother and kittens all spayed and neutered, after which adopting them out (sometimes across the time the kittens are three months previous, give or take),” mentioned a consultant from Kitten Academy.

Followers and supporters of the rescue can watch a dwell stream of the lovable kitties on YouTube. The identical stream has been operating since April 2016 and options one or two teams (known as “courses”) of kittens at a time. The kittens are housed in a eating room and typically in a transformed spare bed room. Since so many individuals benefit from the stream, it’s been lots simpler to search out adoptive households for kittens and momcats who “graduate” the Academy.

Kitten Academy has been on Discord for the previous two years. However in contrast to World Anvil, the Kitten Academy Discord is accessible to patrons solely.

“We’re an enormous pleased household of practically 2,000 folks,” the consultant shared. “I usually seek advice from it as ‘one of the best place on the Web.’”

They use the Discord for saying occasions, such because the KA Tree Adorning Pawrty talked about under, and sustaining a pleasant place for supporters to talk about every little thing kitten-related.

Their patrons love GIFs from the dwell streams (as a result of who wouldn’t desire a spotlight reel of kitten antics?). So Kitten Academy has a Discord bot that catalogs and hyperlinks the GIFs. “The bot, known as KATaru, was created by considered one of our earliest supporters. It will get loaded up with GIFs after which folks within the Discord chat are capable of ask it to seek for and put up the GIFs into the chat. For example, when you wished to see the time that Tiffiny’s kittens used her as a springboard, you would possibly kind “!gif tiffiny springboard” and also you’d get one thing like this,” the volunteer shared.

Right here’s a take a look at the GIF itself:

As well as, they use “Toonkaru,” a normal Discord “mee6” bot, to drag up extra movies and gifs. For instance, a KA patron may kind in “!tinytakedown” to retrieve a video of a cat mother pretending to be pushed over when her kitten pounced.

A video retrieved by the Toonkaru Discord bot exhibiting a momcat pretending to fall over when her kitten pounced. 

However the KA Discord additionally has a extra critical use. “Most significantly, it’s used time and again to alert me of points with the kittens we foster in real-time. It’s a beneficial manner for me to get real-time alerts when a kitten will get into hassle or is sick,” the consultant shared. KA supporters who’re watching the dwell stream will let the volunteers know when a kitten on digital camera has made a large number (like when a kitten named Ink barfed on-screen):

Different occasions, the notifications is likely to be extra optimistic — like celebrating a kitten who has lastly realized to make use of the litter field.

All these perks go a good distance towards rising the Kitten Academy patron rely. That mentioned, Kitten Academy’s fundamental call-to-action is already compelling by itself: Donations go on to rescuing and caring for kittens and their mommas.

“The Discord is, for positive, a significant purpose folks contribute cash to us,” they mentioned. “We began our Patreon web page after repeated requests from followers for a manner they may donate to us. We by no means would have anticipated it to be so successful — there’s sufficient cash coming to us by means of Patreon to simply cowl our commonplace bills, and to this point, sufficient past that it covers the (usually extravagant) vet payments that crop up unexpectedly, however usually.”

Printable Heroes: Collaborating on and Sharing Artwork

Marshall Quick offers free information for recreation masters and adventurers alike to print out miniatures for his or her video games. His work is supported full-time by patrons. In alternate, they get entry to rewards like bonus artwork, voting rights, PSD (Photoshop layers) information, and naturally, Discord.

The Printable Heroes Discord is for patrons solely. Utilizing the Patreon Discord integration, he presents color-coded roles to designate every reward tier. For patrons of “The Council,” the $5/mo tier, he has an unique channel devoted to 1 piece of collaborative artwork monthly.

As for the group dynamic? “It’s fairly wonderful,” he mentioned. “Regardless that I’m fairly lively all through the day, my patrons often reply questions and resolve points amongst themselves earlier than I also have a likelihood to. Everybody is absolutely optimistic and supportive, sharing suggestions, photographs of their video games and minis, recommending assets, and so on.”

As a result of his patrons are so engaged on the platform, he’s capable of get their suggestions as he works. “I wish to share work-in-progress (WIP) previews and get suggestions from my patrons all through the month. They often give me concepts/solidify instructions I can take my work,” Marshall mentioned.

And whereas his group steps up in the case of answering questions and troubleshooting points, he nonetheless maintains a #helpdesk channel to verify everybody’s wants are met.

General, Marshall mentioned, “The group has been nice in answering/resolving their very own points/questions, which saves me a number of time. Discord is a superb group area the place it’s very environment friendly to have interaction patrons and preview work.”

Is Discord Proper for Your Neighborhood?

1000’s of creators on Patreon use the Patreon Discord integration to offer patrons and followers with an area to work together. Some creators make their Discord channels a totally personal area for patrons, whereas others make just some channels personal.

A majority use “roles” to paint code patron’s usernames (a recognition reward, which you’ll be able to study extra about on this article). And lots of, just like the examples above, use Discord for fulfilling different rewards as effectively, together with buyer assist, voting, and further content material.

For those who’d wish to arrange Discord rewards, observe the directions on this tutorial put up.