Patreon wants to provide great options for how, when, and where you interact with your patrons. That’s why we’re building better ways to connect you to your patrons in the environments where they’re most likely to engage across the web.
Below are Patreon’s current partner community forums, and how to choose the best option for your unique community needs.
Patreon’s Community Partners
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Discord
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Discourse
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Community type
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Voice & Text Chat
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Forum
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Patron-only settings
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Patron-only, or public with patron-only chatrooms
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Patron-only, or public with patron-only categories
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Patron perks
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Exclusive text colors
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Custom badges
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Cost
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Free
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Free up to 50,000 pageviews (more details below)
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Discord
Discord is an all-in-one voice and text-chat for gamers and creators that’s free, secure, and works on both your desktop and your phone. You can offer Discord perks to your patrons at different reward tiers, like special roles and access to exclusive chatrooms.
Key features:
- Reward multiple tiers of patrons with special status and exclusive access
- Schedule times to go live on Discord with your fans
Discord is a good fit for you if you want:
- A live chatroom experience rather than a traditional community forum
- Special recognition for your patrons
- Patron-to-patron conversation
Pricing: Discord is free, and the Patreon integration is available for free for Founding creators, or creators in the Pro & Premium plans.
How do I set up my account?
Go to DiscordApp.com and click Open Discord in your browser. This will ask you to enter a username to go through the set up flow. Continue setting up your Discord server by following our guide with step-by-step instructions. Once you’ve got your Discord server set up, you can follow this resource to set up roles for your patrons. We suggest you watch our recording of our Discord livestream workshop for more helpful tips.
How do my patrons set up their accounts?
Once you have added Discord roles to your tiers, existing patrons will be invited to join your Discord server via email. New patrons will find that Discord is included in their benefits via a thank you email after they pledge. They can also follow our guide to receive their Discord role.
Discourse
Discourse is a powerful tool that makes it easy to run and manage a patron-only community forum. Patreon has an integration with Discourse that automatically adds/removes patrons based on their membership access.
Key features:
- Special badges for patrons in your Discourse community
- Private categories within the forum just for patrons
- Optionally, make your entire forum only for patrons
- Excellent Q+A features
- Polls
- Customize the look and feel of your Discourse to fit your brand
Discourse is a good fit for you if you want:
- Patron-only Q&A’s
- Patron-to-patron conversations
- Deeper discussions in a patron-only space
- A place to receive and critique your patrons’ creative work, or have your patrons share their work with other patrons
- A long-lasting hub of all the convos between you and your patrons
Pricing: Founding creators, or creators in the Pro & Premium plans with $50 or more in weekly patronage are eligible for free hosting (up to a 50k per month page limit and on a .discourse.group domain only). Those who exceed the limit can opt to pay for hosting at a 50% discount directly through this URL, or move to free self-hosting. You can use Patreon’s Discourse integration at no extra cost.
How do I set up my account?
How do my patrons set up their accounts?
After a patron pledges to you, they can visit your Discourse forum website and sign in using their Patreon credentials. This adds them automatically to the ‘patrons’ group.
How to notify your patrons
Once you’ve decided which solution you want to use for community interaction, you’ll need to let your patrons know about their new perk. You can bulk message them using Patreon messaging to give them instructions to sign up for your new community. Here is a sample message you can use or adapt as needed:
Dear patrons,
I’m excited to announce a new benefit starting this ___ for my $___ patrons: I’m starting a new community forum where patrons can host discussion and ask me questions. I know you’ve gotten used to interacting with me on Patreon, but this new community offers even more ways for both me and you to interact.
Here’s how to get set up:
[Provide set-up instructions for your patrons]
Can’t wait to find you there!
Still want to stay in touch with me via Patreon? You can always send me a private message by clicking the “more” button (below the patron count number) on my creator page, and then selecting “message”.
Thanks!
Best,
Your creator