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Heads up! This guide will show you how to set up, integrate, and provide your patrons with exclusive Discord rewards via automated bot, putting less pressure on your shoulders as a creator. This article is not used for how to promote or improve your Patreon earnings. This article also assumes that you understand basic server settings like roles, channels, and permissions, as well as having a server already created. You can find helpful guides on channel creation and channel permissions that will help you understand these basics. The following article exists under the assumption that you have a server already in existence, regardless of whether or not it is in actual usage yet.
Let’s start with the obvious question: what is Patreon? In case you are unfamiliar with Patreon, it is a subscription service for content creators similar to YouTube Memberships and Twitch Subscriptions. Supporters ( hereby referred to as “patrons”) can pay a monthly fee to access content from creators they are supporting. This private content can cover a wide range of content including text posts, polls, videos, images, merchandise, and more. The possibilities are truly endless and you, as a content creator, have control over how much value you place on the content you produce and distribute over Patreon.
Patreon also uses tiered platforms based upon monetary commitment. For example, let’s say you are a comic book creator that can generate an entire comic in a month’s time. You could charge patrons $5 to access works in progress, maybe snippets of the story you’re writing, or behind the scenes streams of you working on an anticipated page or panel. At the next $10 tier, patrons can gain access to the whole comic as a reward, and maybe even access polls to help you decide what to do next. Further, a $25 reward could be that patrons have complete access to your entire library, or get a physical edition of your comic book sent to them! The ideas are endless when it comes to what kind of rewards you can offer your patrons.
In fact, one of the new ways to explore rewards systems for patrons is via Discord.
For content creators that use platforms like Patreon, providing rewards to patrons is an absolute necessity because it directly benefits those who choose to support you. One of the simpler rewards creators can provide patrons is a Discord reward system automatically managed by the Patreon Bot. An example of such an award allows you to assign one or more roles to patrons in your Discord server based upon their subscription tier on Patreon. Once they have their designated roles, you can utilize channel permissions to provide your supporters with exclusive access to aspects of your server like hidden channels or perhaps even hoist them in the sidebar of your Discord server as an added bonus. This gives them closer access to you as a creator as well as your content and your community. This, in turn, can make them feel appreciated as support and perhaps allow them to see a direct impact of their support on your content.
The first step to setting up Discord Rewards on Patreon is to have a Patreon account. Once you’ve started building your Patreon page (or have one completed), you’ll need to head into your “Tiers” section of your page.
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Once in the “Tiers” section, pick the tier you’d like to grant the access to your rewards in your Discord server. We recommend that this should be the lowest tier you’d allow patrons to subscribe at in order to receive a special role in a Discord server that we are presuming is public. Once you’ve selected your chosen tier, you’ll need to connect your Patreon to Discord.
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Now, let’s make this reward a reality with the following steps:
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Please note, if you created your server that you plan on adding to your Patreon, you’ll have no trouble finding it in the server list mentioned in Step 4. If you’ve had a friend, moderator, or maybe even a community manager create your server, you might not see it in this list. Make sure you have the Manage Server permission in order to see it. If you don’t, double check with the server owner and have them add it to one of your roles in order to successfully connect to Patreon.
With your Patreon page successfully linked with your Discord server, you may notice this message in Patreon:
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To finalize reward set-up, you need to create the actual roles. We recommend creating a different role for each of the Patreon tiers you have and distinguishing the roles by naming them after the tiers’ name or the amount of money pledged by patrons of each tier. For example, if you have a $50 per month Patreon tier named Top Contributor, you could name the corresponding reward role either “$50” or “Top Contributor.” This usually works out the most suitably for future rewards, because you can easily distinguish your followers who send $5 a month, versus those sending $50 a month, and change role permissions accordingly if you are offering them different levels of Discord access.
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Remember that it is important to keep the Patreon Bot’s role above all the other roles we make for this purpose so it can help manage them.
Now that your tier roles are in the server, there should be no more red warning text on the Patreon Tier Creation page. If there is, give it a quick refresh. The disappearance of this text means that you can now check the box “Gives patrons access to selected Discord roles.” If you are using multiple roles for each tier of your Patreon for organization in your server, make sure they’re all added. After setting your channels and permissions spoken about in the next step, double check that the correct role in your Discord server is associated with the proper tier on your Patreon page.
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Success! You’ve completed the Patreon and Discord integration! Now lets establish accessibility levels.
At this point, you’ll want to build a structure to your server for these new tier roles. Head back to the channel list and decide how you’d like to reward your different tiers. Do you want each tier to have their own channel category, or do you want one channel category with different channels designated to different tiers? Make sure to give each category and/or channel permissions associated with each role that you want to have access to that area.
We have an based upon the channel list image below to see some of our recommendations in action. This example utilizes one channel category for all patrons, but gives certain patron tiers different levels of access.
You’ll notice Patreon allows you to assign users multiple roles when they subscribe to a tier. This makes it handy to ensure your private channels and categories are easier to manage across the different role tiers. In our provided example you’ll see that all patrons have access to an exclusive general text and voice channel to talk to each other regardless of tiers. However, different tier levels are given access to different additional perks such as sharing social media links for the creator to follow back, polls for future content, and a VIP text and voice chat to better talk to the creator they’re supporting.
Congratulations on launching your new and/or updated Patreon page! The beauty of this system is that you can continue to create new roles and channel permissions to best serve your community as you continue to grow. Now that you’re done with the basic steps outlined in this guide, all you have to do is edit/add/drop/shift roles around as needed to ensure you are making the most of your Discord Rewards patron program.
Patreon rewards give your fans and supporters exclusives in exchange for supporting your work. Having this automated system to handle and manage your supporters means you can spend more time making new content, and less time worrying about a bot, or a function in Discord whenever new patrons sign up. It also makes managing permissions much more simpler because you have a lot more control over which roles a patron is assigned to based on their subscription tier.
