Keeping community in sync with Patreon and Discord

The Discord integration for Patreon helps creators build online community with secure text chat that works on desktop and mobile devices. With flexible controls for different membership levels, special roles, and access to exclusive chat rooms, it’s one of our most popular integrations. Patreon recently released a major improvement for how we keep active members in sync with Discord role access.

In this episode of Backstage with Patreon, Patreon Product Manager Eric Fong sheds light on the creator feedback and planning that went into the recent updates and steps you can take if you want to start using Discord and Patreon together.

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Episode transcript

Brian Keller:
Hello, creators. You are backstage with Patreon, where we open the curtain on how to build a thriving business on Patreon. I'm Brian Keller from the Creator Success Team, and today's guest is Eric Fong. He's Patreon's product manager, overseeing the integration between Patreon and Discord. He also previously worked as a product manager at Meta, working on Facebook's reality labs team and on creator monetization. And Discord is one of the most popular integrations for Patreon creators. It allows them to build community with a lot of flexible controls over the access for paid members and their wider audience. And Patreon recently released a major improvement in how we keep active members in sync with Discord role access. And Eric will walk through how it works and how creators can make sure that they're able to take advantage of the functionality.

So let's get started with Eric Fong on Backstage with Patreon. And tell creators, if they haven't used Discord and Patreon together yet, what makes it work so well to build a community with their audience?

Eric Fong:
Well, it's great to be here, Brian, and thanks for having me on the show. When it comes to Patreon and Discord, Discord's one of the most popular integrations. And the reason for that is with Patreon, it's all about building out exclusive content and exclusive communities. So you've got your biggest fans visiting your Patreon, engaging with the content. And that's why Discord works so well, is you've built out a community of people that are really passionate about what you're producing on Patreon. They want to discuss, and they want a private, more intimate space for that, a space where you're involved and where they can connect with other greatest fans.

And the reason that we've found this integration working so well is because, one, you've got the right folks in the group, in that community, and two is we can create a scenario where you've got the content on Patreon and then you've got the community Discord, and it just works seamlessly together where you can engage in both dimensions of that, create a world.

Brian Keller:
Well, so for a creator who is thinking about using Discord with Patreon, setting up community there, what are the actual steps that they take within Patreon, within Discord to actually make it happen?

Eric Fong:
So if you're interested in setting up Discord, integrating with Patreon, first step is to set up your Discord server. So I'm going to assume you have no context on Discord. Discord, you have a server, you've got channels, and then certain channels can be private, as in not everyone can join them, they need certain permissions. So within Discord, you set it up, and then you want to create this concept of a role. So as a fan that joins this Discord, people could have different roles. Maybe your most engaged fans will get this certain role that gets access to certain channels or certain benefits. The role is important because that's going to be our connection point to Patreon. So you'll want at least one role that you create on Discord once you've set up a server.

You probably want a couple channels. And I'm going to assume that most people will have public channels, which anyone can join and private channels. Let's say for Patreon, it's designed for the private channel. So essentially what's going to happen here is you've got your Discord server. You've got private channels. And your patrons on Patreon are going to get access to the private channels. So once you set up this role, and it has access to the private channel —so let's call this role "blue" — if you have the role "blue," you're going to get access to Private Channel A. And we're designing this in a way where we want our patrons to have access to Private Channel A. Those are the only folks we want in that private channel, because they're our biggest fans.

So now, we're good on the Discord side. We've got the role set up. We've got the private channels. When we hop over to Patreon, we're going to go into the app section, and we're going to connect Discord. Once we've connected Discord, it'll ask you to authenticate your Discord, and then you can select the specific server that you set up. Once you've made that connection, the next step you want to do is assign this role to the tiers that you actually want to grant this Discord benefit. So if I have a Silver, Bronze, Gold tier — let's say I want to grant Discord to Silver and Bronze — I'm going to go into the Silver and the Bronze tier and select the "blue" role that we had created on Discord and connect it. So essentially, I can say that for a Silver tier, you're going to get access to the "blue" role on Discord, and then we're good in terms of the creator setup.

So once we've done that, we're all good to go. One thing I forgot to call out is when you connect your Discord, it's going to ask you to grant access to a Patreon bot with certain permissions. This is going to be important to grant access, because this bot is going to essentially be the gatekeeper. They're going to add people to the Discord and grant them specific roles. And then it's also important that it has access to kick people out, because if someone is no longer a patron, unfortunately, they don't get access to the cool community, and they're going to lose the role permission. And so you want to grant access to the bot, make sure it has all of those permissions, and then make sure it is going to be at the top of the role permissions. And the reason for that is you want a bot to be able to manage all the different roles and permissions.

And so that's a little bit jargon-y, but the simple way I'd put this is you connect your Discord, grant access to the bot. You're probably okay at this point. If you've got a more complex setup, then I can talk about that, but 99% of the setups are good to go there. Go to the Patreon, do the role connection, and those are the steps you need to take to set up Discord and connect it to your Patreon.

Brian Keller:
So if there are some creators that are a little bit apprehensive of the time it'll take to engage in community, whether it's on Discord or other places or opening up themselves in that way, talk a little bit about why we actually know that that's actually quite valuable for creators to grow their earnings by acquiring new patrons as well as retaining them.

Eric Fong:
We know that Discord is one of the most used integrations, and we know that a lot of our successful creators have built vibrant communities on Discord. And what's most important there is, that's been critical for retaining members, but it's also reduced in terms of the time needed as a creator in terms of managing it. So what I mean by that is, with anything you do, there's some sort of investment startup costs.

Let's talk about Discord. You set it up. You maybe want to create some topics for your community to talk about. But at some point in time, what tends to happen is you've got a couple of fans that want to be involved and want to support, and they will actually take the baton and start running the community, organizing events. And so many of these communities have become independent. It's easy for the creator to almost not get involved. And so as a creator, investing in setting up this Discord, yes, it does require some initial upfront time. But once it gets going, it's very effective in terms of retaining your members and also just great ROI in terms of the membership retention and in terms of the time spent that you're spending as a creator to manage Discord. It goes down.

Brian Keller:
And we've had this integration for a couple years now. What was the kind of feedback we've been hearing from creators or anything that was on your mind and the team's mind in terms of roadmap and the kind of things we wanted to do with Discord?

Eric Fong:
This is an interesting question, particularly because there's so many different use cases in ways you can use Patreon and Discord together. And Discord's quite powerful, Patreon as well. I think the biggest piece of feedback was really around when it comes to what creators care about, it's managing that exclusive community. At the end of the day, Patreon's really around exclusive content and community and the feedback was, how do we make sure that when it comes to Patreon and our members that they're part of that exclusive community? That exclusive community is the Patreon fans, and that wasn't always working, and that's one of the things that we've fixed over the past few weeks.

Brian Keller:
And let's actually make sure that creators understand there's not just one way to use Patreon and Discord to build a community. Some creators will use Discord and it be exclusive. It's only for their active members on Patreon. Other creators will actually make it a mix. It's their wider audience, but then they might do something specific or just available to their active members there. And the creator themselves might be very active in all those spaces. Might be more of a place that's really just for their members to interact. Is that a good coverage of what are different ways Patreon creators are using Discord? It's really quite varied.

Eric Fong:
That's a great summary. You could think of it as an inverted pyramid where you've got a Discord where anyone can join the community. And then you might have the fans, people who actually engage with the creator, with the content. And then you've got the exclusive community, and that's where a Patreon's connection comes in, and we help make sure that those are your actual fans in Patreon. They're on that bottom part of the pyramid. It's a smaller group, but it's one that's most engaged and most passionate about the creator and the content.

Brian Keller:
And let's talk about that trade off. There's lots of things that creators are asking us for, both in this integration but just in general, but also we want to make sure that we're doing a great job delivering a good experience on a manageable set of things. How did you think about that when it came to this integration and the work that we've been doing recently?

Eric Fong:
I think that's a great question, because there were a lot of paths we could have taken in terms of the updates we made with the Discord integration. We wanted to focus on doing what we do best, and that's around enabling that exclusive community. So the most important thing was to make sure that as a creator, I can feel confident that when it comes to my exclusive Discord community, specifically the roles that I'm granting to my patrons in Discord, that works a hundred percent of the time. So those folks that are Patreon get access. All the other things are nice-to-haves and things that you can actually manage within Discord. So we felt that it didn't make sense for us to duplicate the same functionality that existed on Discord, that you can actually use their role management system today for non-patrons.

And so what we said is, "Let's make sure that if you join the Patreon as a fan and member, and you become a patron and you want to connect to a Discord, when you hit connect, you're added to that community. And you as a member, it's super easy and you can feel confident that you'll be given proper Discord benefits. As a creator, you can feel confident that if I have a member and they want to join my exclusive Discord community, they can do so. And I know that folks that are in that community are exclusively part of the Patreon."

Brian Keller:
So it makes sense. That was our goal to really make this solid connection between active members when they have access to their benefits and their roles in Discord and making sure that stayed in sync there. Talk a little bit about how we then went from that initial idea to figuring out there are lots of ways we can implement that, how do we involve creators in that process of figuring out what changes, what fixes to actually make?

Eric Fong:
When it came to building out this product, we went through a lot of iterations, worked closely with you, Brian, and with the team, and figuring out what were the things that were most important to creators and what were the nice-to-haves. On the creator side, one of the things we realized was, it should be incredibly simple and clear what we're actually doing with this. So right now, if you're a creator and you go to your Discord setup, you can select a specific tier that you're offering in terms of benefits and connect to the role. It's a one-to-one connection, and it's exclusive. You can do that for different tiers, and if you manage different pages, you can do so on those creative pages as well. We wanted to make sure that was very clear cut. And when you complete that, you get the Discord bot, and it gets set up on the Discord side.

And so it was really kind of a one step on the Patreon side, grant access on the Discord side, and then you're done. And we didn't want to add any more additional insights. We actually decided not to give this additional functionality, because we felt that would open up a set of pathways and actions that a creator could take that would actually be potentially detrimental with the Discord setup. So we kept that simple and very clear cut. It's a similar instance on the member side where once you hit “connect,” then you're connected.

The other thing we added as well was we realized there were a lot of members that were pledged to multiple creators that had Discord access, and some of them didn't actually want to engage in the community. So we did offer an opt-out, and we created a single screen where you can manage all your connections as a patron and easily opt into the ones you want to join and opt out of the ones you don't want to.

Brian Keller:
And maybe that's a subtle point. I know one of the things that your team was trying to add is more transparency, more ability to see as a creator and as a patron, what is the status? Do I have Discord connected? Is it working or not? How does that actually manifest itself in the product experience now?

Eric Fong:
Great question. So one of the things we ran into is, how much do you focus on giving transparency into how things are working versus just fixing the issues at hand? At the end of the day, the integration should work a hundred percent of the time. But at the same time, there's a lot going on behind the scenes, and as a creator, you want to feel confident and have some transparency and controls over what is happening within the system. So as a creator, you wanted to make sure that you knew which role was connected to your creator campaign. And as a member, we wanted to make sure that you could actually see that your connection status was active.

The couple things we did to do this was, one, is just moved the Discord integration to a more prominent space, so it's much more clear where you can access it on both the creator and member side. And then two, was on that page you have the connection. It's as simple as the connection status. Is it set up, and is it connected? Yes or no? So we kept it at that as opposed to going deeper and providing insight into things that which you, as a creator or member, can't take action against. So that was one of the principles was, let's provide transparency into things you can take action against versus transparency into things that are outside of your control, because that is just more worrisome than confidence-building.

Brian Keller:
That makes sense. We definitely hear from the creators that my team works with, they love using Discord, but it can be hard to figure out what's working or not. Discord is super powerful, super customizable, and so from what I've seen, I know they're really appreciating that ability to see what the status is and even figure out, well, what is the error that they're facing? What is the kind of thing that they need to clean up? Let's talk about that for a moment. What were some of the things that actually made it so creators didn't have the connection working properly and that we're now able to guide them a little bit more towards the fixes that they can actually do on their own?

Eric Fong:
So that's a great call out. One of the things we do is if your setup is incorrect, then we let you know what is wrong with that. And the PMM team has done a great job building out a set of resources that clearly indicate if given this set up blocker or challenge, take action X, Y or Z. And one of the things that does come up a lot is around, one, not having the bot set up and given access to. And so this was an interesting one in terms of creators feeling uneasy about giving this bot kick permissions. That's one of the pieces of feedback we did get. And so what we've done is we've built out a set of education to complement a lot of this, and what's most interesting about this product rollout is there's a bit of product changes and there's a bit of workflow and behavior changes.

And so we are going through a transition period where I think it's building confidence with the creator that the system is working appropriately and two, updating the workflow in a way that might feel troublesome in the near term, but it's going to be much more scalable and is going to require the creator not having to go back and check their system making sure people have access. So that is one of the things where we lean on the education and where we provided the transparency within the product to give the actionable next steps and make sure the creator has the proper setup.

And once they have the proper setup for the Discord, they've got the bot with the relevant permissions, it's in the right priority order, so it needs to be at a certain ranking within Discord so that it can take action on the role of that it is managing, as an example. Once those are all set up, then the thing will work a hundred percent of the time.

Brian Keller:
And we know from talking to our creators, actually one of the things that we really need to emphasize and creators sometimes need to adjust to is that it's so important for there to be a one-to-one connection between the tier on Patreon and a particular role on Discord. That's what we're actually keeping in sync. That is what allows the integration to work there properly. There might be some creators out there who have been adding individual users on Discord manually to the same kind of role that they have that represents their Patreon audience there. Can you talk a little bit about what these creators should actually be doing instead to make sure that that behavior, being able to add someone individually on Discord, actually still works with the way that the integration handles things?

Eric Fong:
I think this is an interesting use case where essentially, you want a chat within Discord or a channel that is not going to reflect your exclusive community on Patreon, which I think is totally fine, and creators have good reasons for that. Maybe they want more folks or maybe they want to grant special access to a certain group that isn't subscribed to their Patreon. And so in this scenario, the way to think about it is going back to that kind of inverted pyramid where essentially, at the bottom of the pyramid is the Patreon patrons that will automatically get access to the exclusive channel and get the relevant roles. A step above that, in the middle of the pyramid is probably where this mainly-added-by-creators set lives.

And the way to do this is within Discord, Patreon will manage the role a hundred percent that you assigned to Patreon. So let's call that role A. So role A is mapped to Patreon, and we're going to manage it a hundred percent. Now, you also want other people that are not patrons to have similar access or you essentially want to replicate the role, for whatever reason. What we recommend is to create role B, grant it the exact same permissions as the Patreon role, and you can manually assign that out. The reason that we recommend keeping it separate versus trying to integrate and use a Patreon role for both scenario, is because this is where the original problem came out of sync.

As Patreon, we have visibility into our side of the system, and we can be confident around what we pass over to Discord. But whatever happens on Discord, we don't have visibility on that. So we made the decision to say, "That's fine. You can set it up how you want to manage it on Discord, but let's keep that separate, but you can grant the same permissions, and it'll achieve the same outcome you want as creator."

Brian Keller:
All right. Well, I want to wrap up with one question. It's actually about, as you've seen different creators and how they use Discord and manage communities there, do you have an example of a creator you think is doing something really cool or the way that they've actually incorporated community and Discord into what they offer on Patreon?

Eric Fong:
I don't have a specific creator, but I've had a couple discussions. And I think the most interesting, fun one is just around release parties. So when it comes to podcasts or video creators that are releasing on a weekly basis, we've found that a lot of Discord communities will have a watch party. The release comes out on Thursday. Let's watch together. Or we know that at 10 p.m., after the release comes out at 2 p.m., the creator will come into the community. There might be a community manager. There'll be a bit of a Q&A, a discussion.

And that's been really cool to see this coalescing around the content and the creator, this regular thing to look forward to. And it's a scenario in a use case that really shows the power of Patreon and Discord, where again, you've got the content and the Patreon experience and then you go over to Discord and you've got that community, that chat, that discussion, that feeling of being in the same room with people.

Brian Keller:
All right, well, let's wrap things up there. We've talked about the value of using Patreon and Discord together to build community, the journey that our team has been on to take the feedback we're hearing from creators, the things that weren't working as well as it should be in terms of the syncing and the connection there, and to make tough choices about what improvements make and how to keep that streamlined. The goal about transparency for creators and for patrons about the status of Discord for them, and to really build that confidence, we want creators to know that it's syncing properly and what they can be doing with it.

And also some things, check for errors as a creator there. Keep your roles one-to-one so that it maps and we can keep those things in sync. And for any creators that are just thinking about getting started, the instructions about how to use Discord with Patreon and some of the benefits there. So thanks, Eric, for walking creators through this on Backstage with Patreon.

Eric Fong:
Thanks so much, Brian. Appreciate it.

Brian Keller:
Tune in next week to Backstage with Patreon, when we'll be sharing the key insights from a panel of Patreon creators at an event called Pull Up: A Conversation with Black Creators. Pull Up is Patreon's incubator and creative community built to connect and amplify creators of color. And you'll get to hear from three of the creators involved in Pull Up: KAMAUU, Jouelzy, and Jade Fox. They'll be covering the content that monetizes best on Patreon, involving their audience in the creation process and making Patreon a healthy part of their work as a creator.

To catch every episode of Backstage with Patreon, follow or subscribe in your podcast app and leave us a review. We also have transcripts available at patreon.com/backstage. You're growing as a creator by listening to the show, so why not share the insights from this episode with another creator on Patreon or who is running a creative business? We'd love to have you as an active collaborator with Backstage with Patreon. Come join the discussion in the Patreon Creator Discord. Follow the link in the episode notes, and you can get answers to your follow-up questions directly from the guests and weigh in on what topics we'll be covering next. Editing by Tyler Morrisette. I'm Brian Keller. See you next time, backstage!