Give your patrons the gift of communication with Discord. Discord is a voice and text chat app where you can build your community. Learn more about Discord, HERE. Our Discord integration makes it easy for you to access to your Discord server with special roles for patrons.
Note: Before setting up your roles or connecting your Discord account to your Patreon account, you’ll need to set up a Discord Server. Learn how to set up your Discord server, HERE.
In this article we’ll go over:
- Setting up roles in your Discord server
- Connecting your Discord server to your Patreon account
- Giving the Patreon Bot the required permissions
- Adding Discord roles to your Patreon tiers
- How this integration is magic
- Commonly asked questions
For the purpose of this article, we’ll be showing screenshots of the Discord app, but know that you can do these things either in the Discord app, or on the Discord site.
Step 1: Select the Discord server that you would like to connect to your Patreon account from the left-vertical menu which lists your servers.
Step 2: Open the Server Settings window and navigate to the Roles tab. Set up as many roles as you’d like – you’ll be able to use any of the roles you set up here for your Patreon tiers.
Step 1: Navigate to your page editor.
Step 2: Once in the tier section of your page editor, choose an existing tier you would like to add Discord to or add a new tier. Scroll until you see the connect to discord button.
Step 3: Once you click connect to discord, login to your Discord account via the pop-up window that appears.
Note: Be sure to keep Manage Roles and Create Instant Invite checked in the authorization screen!
Step 1: Navigate to the Roles section of your Discord server settings. Find the new role “Patreon”, and drag it above all the roles on your server. This is super important. If you do not drag the “Patreon” role to the top of the list, the bot will not assign your patrons their roles and you will not be able to add roles as benefits on tiers.
Note: Do not choose this role (Patreon) for any of your tiers...but more on that later.
Step 2: (optional, but helpful) Rename the "Patreon" role to "Patreon Bot" – this will help you remember to not choose the role for any of your tiers. It’s important not to disable any of the permissions pre-selected for this role – otherwise, the bot might not be able to assign roles to your patrons.
Please note: the Patreon Discord bot will only work with the two required permissions that it has by default. If you have other bots on your server (which is just fine) make sure they are not adding or removing any permissions to our bot. Things will break.
Step 1: Log in to your Patreon account and navigate back to your page editor (if you aren’t already there). Click on the tiers tab from the upper menu.
Step 3: If you’ve completed the previous steps and connected your Discord server, there should be an additional Discord Roles section for each tier when you opt to edit them. Add as many roles to a given tier as you’d like – you can even add the same role to multiple tiers.
Important Note: Do not add the "Patreon Bot" (or whatever you might have renamed it) to any tier – this will break the integration!
Example: You could create a “Patrons” role, which gives people access to certain channels, and then a “Patron Admins” role, which gives people admin permissions in those channels. If you had two tiers—$1 and $10—you could then assign the “Patrons” role to both your $1 and $10 tiers and the “Patron Admins” role to only the $10 tier.
We’ll handle the rest from here! Once a new or existing patron connects their Discord account, we’ll automatically invite them to the server (if they're not already in it) and assign them the role(s) corresponding to their chosen tier. If a patron deletes their pledge or their payment declines, we’ll remove the role(s) from their Discord account for you.
Note: We can’t stress enough how important it is that the Patreon Bot appears above any patron roles. If the bot is lower than any patron roles, your patrons will not be invited to your server. Remember, your roles should look like this:
Q: Will non-patrons on my Discord server be affected?
A: We will only modify the roles of those who are your patrons. Additionally, if a patron deletes their pledge, we’ll revoke the roles which you asked us to assign them.
Q: Will other roles on my Discord server be affected?
A: Nope, we’ll only modify the roles you’ve selected in your Patreon tiers. For example, if you have roles A, B, C, and D, but have only assigned A and B to your Patreon tiers, we’ll never touch C and D.
Q: How long will it take for roles to be assigned in Discord?
A: Most of the time it will happen immediately. If you have a lot of patrons who have connected their Discord accounts, however, and you change the roles tied to their tier, it may take as many as a few hours for the roles to be reassigned.
Note:Patrons who were pledged to you before you set up your Discord Patreon roles will need to update their pledge, so that they can land back on the “thank you” page containing their invite to your Discord server. Feel free to direct any patrons who did not receive their server invite, here.
Q: The Patreon bot is offline on my server. Is something wrong?
A: You’re all good! The bot will appear to be offline on your server, but will still be able to invite your patrons and assign them the correct roles.
Q: My patrons aren't being invited to the server, or aren't receiving their roles! What's wrong?
A: It might be due to the permissions the Patreon Bot has. Make sure that (1) you didn’t add Patreon Bot's role (which should be named "Patreon", unless you renamed it) to a tier, and that (2) that the Patreon Bot is above all of the roles that you’ve added to your roles. The roles should look like, this.
If you've confirmed both of those and it's still not working, there may be a short delay, or there may be an issue on our end. If you think it's the latter, let us know!
Q: My former patrons aren't being kicked from to the server, they only lost their roles! What's wrong?
A: The Patreon Bot manages your roles and not the server. So if a patron deletes their pledge on Patreon, their Discord role will be removed, not their invite to the server. If you want to remove ex-patrons from the server, this must be done via Discord on your end for now.
Learn about managing your roles in this article from Discord: Role Management 101