Happy New Year! 2021 Patreon Updates (Patreon)

Happy new year, everyone!

As we roll into our third year of this podcast, we wanted to reexamine our Patreon and the rewards we have on offer. Our growth these past few years has been staggering, and with that growth comes necessary adjustments to make sure we’re still providing as good an experience as we can.

Before we get too deep into it - these aren’t gigantic sweeping changes. As you’ll see, it’s all little tweaks and adjustments, based on your feedback and our own internal discussions armed with the knowledge of running this thing for the past couple years.

Speaking of feedback - part of that was reaching out to you, our Patrons, when we did our 2020 Patron poll a couple weeks ago. Thank you to everyone who took the time to fill out the survey - your feedback has been tremendously useful in helping us form a clearer picture of our overall patronage (and if you haven’t - there’s still time to fill it out as any and all feedback is useful to us!)

Fun side note - while much of the data we collected lines up with a lot of what we already knew through other means (e.g. demographics and geography broadly lines up with what the Spotify Podcast dashboard tells us), there were a few things that really jumped out.

For example: 44% of you said you have “DMd a campaign.” That’s nearly HALF! We have some upcoming merch products that I think the DMs among you will be very excited about (more on this soon!)

Also everyone wants dice - we hear ya, we're gonna try and figure that out.

So without further ado, here are the tweaks we’re making:

We’re slowing down the cadence of Merch by Patreon rewards to a new item every six months

We were among the first Patreon accounts with access to this brand spankin’ new feature when Patreon rolled it out last year. As you might expect in any complex, automated, large-scale global shipping system, it was a learning experience both for us and the folks at Patreon as it rolled out.

As a reminder, the way this system works is as follows: when you pledge at EX-L or higher and stay pledged for three consecutive billing cycles, Patreon automatically sends you a piece of merch to the address on your account. In 2020, our reward cadence was introducing a new item every quarter, or every 3 months. After a year of trying that out, we came to the conclusion that a new item every 6 months was likely a better system.

We found that by debuting new items at the same cadence that you needed to stay pledged to receive those items (i.e. new item every 3 months, you have to stay pledged for 3 months) made it difficult to communicate exactly what item someone was getting if questions arose. Moreover, when dealing with inevitable customer support needs (breakage, lost items, changed addresses, etc.), this overlap led to further complication in making sure people were getting the right items they had pledged for in a timely manner.

By slowing the cadence down to introducing new items once every six months, we think we can save a lot of headache and confusion, as well as be able to more effectively address customer support needs.

(Speaking of which - if you haven’t gotten something that you should’ve - feel free to reach out by shooting us a message here in the comments or DMing Ashley on the Discord and we’ll help you sort it out!)

By the way, we’ll have a new mug design to kick off 2021 coming this week!

“Livestreams” on the Touring tier is transforming to “Daddy’s Game Night”

Initially, when livestreams was added to this tier, we had hoped to be able to do more livestreams of our recording process. The difficulties and realities of 2020 made it clear that it’s a much better idea to have a standardized, scheduled event that we do. Inspired by the positive response to our Among Us MBIC, we’ll be doing this instead:

• Daddy’s Game Night - Every two months, join the daddies for a live stream of online games (be they video, board, or mind!) Snacks will be provided, but only at Anthony’s house, and you have to physically be there, and he’s not telling you where he lives, and if you show up he’ll turn off the lights and pretend nobody’s home (streams will be recorded and archived)

We’re revamping the Elite level tier to remove the limit. In order to do this, we’re tweaking the rewards to ensure they scale properly

One of the most common requests we get behind the scenes is “When will more Elite tier seats open up?” When we started, we had limited that number to 8 (the number of people that can fit inside a Honda Odyssey minivan, natch), and last year we upped it to 20.

A unique feature of the Elite tier are the “credits” you can redeem every six months. While that’s become much more manageable now thanks to our content producer Courtney, the one-shots with Anthony were particularly difficult to coordinate. These sessions required a significant amount of planning, group juggling, and email back-and-forths to ensure time zones and schedules lined up from literally all corners of the earth. At 8 people, it was manageable. At 20, it was exponentially more complex, and at scale, we simply don’t think we’ll be able to do it. As such, we’ve decided to retire that particular reward at this tier, and are making up for its loss with a few other Elite level perks. 

Starting now, Elite tier seats are open to everyone, and will feature the following rewards:

• Dadventure Modules - These RPG modules, released every two months, come with detailed DM notes, sample dialog, and custom audio assets so that you and your group can experience entirely original adventures in the Dungeons and Daddies universe. You’ll receive fully playable PDF adventures with encounters, enemies, and  improvisation tips when your players inevitably do something you didn’t expect!
• The Vizier Chat - A private Discord chat every two months where you can ask the Daddy Master questions on topics ranging from, “How often do you spank your cats on the butt?” to DMing roleplaying games, and Dungeons and Daddies stuff too I guess.

Additionally, every six months, receive a credit good for one of the following:

• A miniature (up to 35mm) painted by Matt! Make one on HeroForge or send one in!
• A D&D workshop! An hour-long Discord workshop where we work with you to flesh out a character or give advice on your own campaigns!
• A Dad Cameo! One of the daddies will make a cameo appearance in your D&D campaign as whatever you want - NPC, Dad, whatever (also the session can’t be just you so this doesn’t get awkward).
• Dad Reads! Any character from the show will record a voice or video message for you!

So that's it! We've updated the descriptions on the tiers and we hope these tweaks will improve the Patreon experience for everyone. Once again, we’d like to thank you for your support and we look forward to bringing you loads of more dad-related and dad-adjacent content in 2021!