title: “Patrons”

This guide covers the Patrons module. If your gallery has not switched it on (the Owner does that in Settings → Extensions), this page will not match what you see — skip it for now.

Patrons

For gallery staff. The people who buy from you, visit you and ask about your artists — typed in once, instead of living in the visitors book and a drawer of sale slips.

Patrons is a self-serve extension. Galleries that already run the Artwork Catalog have it switched on; anyone else turns it on in Settings → Extensions. It needs the same permission as the Artists screen (Artwork Catalog), so the people who can see your artists can see your patrons.

What do you call them?

Not sure whether the art world says customers, clients or patrons? Neither is any two galleries, so you choose. In Settings → Patrons pick one of:

The word you pick renames the sidebar entry, the page headings and the empty screens. It changes no data — the same records are underneath whichever word is on the wall, and you can change your mind any time.

The short version

1. Open Patrons (or whatever you called it) in the sidebar.
2. Press + Add patron.
3. Type the First Name and, if you have it, the Last Name. Everything else is optional.
4. Say how they reached you and, if you know it, the date they visited.
5. Tick a consent box only if the person actually said yes, and say how.
6. Save.

If the email you typed is already on file, the existing record is updated with what you typed instead of a second one being created, and the screen says so.

Adding a person

Consent is never assumed

There are two consents, and they are different questions:

• May we contact them about this? — following up on the piece they asked about, or the sale they made.
• May we send them news and invitations? — the newsletter and openings.

Both start off. Somebody writing their name in the visitors book has not agreed to be marketed to, and neither has somebody who bought a painting. Tick a box only when the person said yes, and record how — told you, wrote it down, a web form, or by email. The date is recorded for you the moment you tick it, and stays as the date they actually agreed even if you later correct how.

Untick a box and both the date and the method are cleared. A consent that has been withdrawn keeps no trace that it once stood.

Newsletter signups and inquiries from your website arrive here already, with the consent the visitor gave on the form.

Finding someone

The search box matches part of a name, an email, or a phone number. Phone fragments match on digits, so (555) 123, 555-123 and 555123 all find the same person. Three digits is the shortest phone fragment that searches.

You only ever see your own gallery’s people. Another gallery on CartonCrew cannot see, search or edit yours, and you cannot see theirs.

Sorting the list

Beside the search box, Sort offers two orders:

Capitals do not matter (alan sits before Bob). People with no name in the column being sorted come last, and the order holds while you search. Your choice is remembered in this browser, so the list opens the same way next time.

People added before names had two boxes

Patrons typed in through the old single Name box were split once for you: the last word became the Last Name and the rest the First Name (a one-word name is a First Name only). Open the person and press Edit to see the split and correct it if it guessed wrong — Mary Ann Smith becomes Mary Ann / Smith, which is right, but a double-barrelled surname without a hyphen will need a nudge.

Does their email address work?

Every person with an email shows an Email Validity badge beside the two consent badges, in the list and on their own page. It answers one question: has mail from your gallery actually reached this address?

Hover over the badge to see the date. On the person’s own page the date is shown beside it (since …).

• Only real mail moves it. The badge changes when an email you sent through Email Campaigns is delivered or bounces. Nobody on your staff can set it by hand, and another gallery’s mail never changes it.
• A full mailbox is not a bounce. A temporary failure (a full mailbox, an away message) changes nothing; only a permanent bounce marks an address as Bounced.
• It is not consent. An address that works is not permission to write to it, and a person who stops wanting your mail does not make their address “bounced”. The consent badges answer that question.
• A new address starts again. Change someone’s email and the badge goes back to Not yet known: nothing has been sent to the new address yet.
• Campaigns skip bounced addresses. A person whose address is Bounced is left out of your campaigns, so you are not writing to an address that does not work. Not yet known addresses are sent to: sending is how you find out.
• Nobody is ever deleted because their mail bounced. Their record and history stay.

Finding who to write to next

On the Patrons page (sidebar → Patrons), use the Email box beside Sort: choose Not yet known, Delivers or Bounced to list only those people, or Any to see everyone again. It works together with the search box and the sort order.

When someone stops your emails, or corrects their address

People can do both themselves, without asking you or signing in. In your public site’s footer, beside Remove my details, the link Email preferences opens a page that asks for an email and one choice: Stop emails from this gallery or Correct my email address. Whatever they type, the page answers the same sentence, so nobody can use it to find out who is on your list. If the address is on file, your gallery emails a link that works once, for one hour; opening it changes nothing, and one button does.

Stopping the emails. It turns off both consents for that person at your gallery: Marketing (your newsletters and campaigns) and Contact (the other messages you send by choice). The date and the words Unsubscribed by the patron themselves are recorded. Their record, their purchases and their history stay, and it never touches the same person’s details at another gallery.

Correcting the address. The link goes to their current address and lets them type a new one. A second message goes to the new address, and only when they confirm it there does it replace the old one. The corrected address starts at Email Validity: Not yet known, and their consents do not change. If the new address already belongs to another patron of yours, nothing changes and nobody is told which addresses you hold. Each correction is recorded in your audit as a one-way hash, never the address itself.

Seeing who stopped themselves. On the list and on a person’s own page, next to the consent badges, a grey badge says what happened and when:

A bounce is not one of these: it shows in the Email Validity badge, because it says the address does not work, not that the person said no. If you record fresh marketing consent for someone (open them, tick the box, choose how they told you), the badge goes away.

Adding many people at once (bulk upload)

For owners and admins. If your visitors book or mailing list already lives in a spreadsheet, you can bring it in as one file instead of typing each person.

1. Open Patrons in the sidebar and press Bulk upload.

2. Press Download template. It is a CSV with this header row and two example rows to copy:

   First Name, Last Name, Email, Phone, Address Line 1, Address Line 2, City, State, ZIP, Country, Source, Visited, Notes, Contact Consent, Contact Consent Method, Contact Consent Note, Marketing Consent, Marketing Consent Method, Marketing Consent Note, Email Consent, Email Consent Method, Email Consent Note

3. Put one person per row, delete the two examples, and save the file as CSV UTF-8 (in Excel: File → Save As → CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited)).

4. Choose what happens when a row’s email is already on file (see below).

5. Press Choose CSV and pick the file. You get a preview: every row says Create, Update or Skip, with the reason for each skip, and the totals. Nothing has been saved yet.

6. Press Apply to save. Press Cancel to change the file and try again.

One file takes at most 2,000 rows. A bigger list goes in as several files.

What each column takes

Rules the upload follows

• A row is matched by email, within your gallery only, ignoring capital letters and spaces. If the same email appears twice in one file, the second row is skipped.
• A row with no email is saved only if it has a name and a phone or an address. Otherwise there would be no way to find the person again.
• Consent is never assumed. A consent is saved as yes only when its column says yes and its method column says how. A yes without a method skips the whole row, with the reason, so you can fix the file and upload it again. The date of the consent is the date of the upload.
• No consent column, no change. Leave the consent columns out of the file entirely and nobody’s consent is touched, whatever the strategy.
• A phone that is not a US 10-digit number skips the row. The person is not saved without their number; fix it and upload again.
• An email that is not a real address skips the row.

When the email is already on file

Every upload is recorded once in the audit (who, when, and how many were created, updated and skipped; never anybody’s name, email or phone), and it appears in Settings → Recent Activity.

If the file is refused

• “The first row must be the template’s header row” — the columns are named differently. Download the template and paste your rows under its header.
• “This file is not saved as UTF-8” — save it again as CSV UTF-8.
• “One upload takes at most 2,000” — split the file.

Exporting patrons

For owners and admins only; nobody else sees the button, and the server refuses everyone else.

1. Open Patrons in the sidebar (it carries the word your gallery chose, such as Collectors) and press Export patrons at the top of the list.
2. Choose All patrons or Marketing-consented only (the people who said yes to May we send them news and invitations?).
3. Press Export, then CSV or Excel (.xlsx). The file opens in Excel or Google Sheets.

The file holds, in this order: Display name, First name, Last name, Email, Phone, City, State, ZIP, Country, Contact consent, Contact consent date, Contact consent method, Marketing consent, Marketing consent date, Marketing consent method, Source, First seen, Last visit. A US 10-digit phone reads (555) 123-4567; consent reads Yes or No with its date and how it was given. There are no internal ids and no notes.

Safe to open. A value that a spreadsheet would run as a formula (one starting with an equals sign, plus, minus or at sign) is saved with a leading apostrophe, so it shows as text and never runs. The file opens correctly in Excel, including symbols like × and accented names, and Bulk upload takes the apostrophe off again.

Every export is recorded: who, when, which choice and how many rows. It also shows in Settings → Recent Activity.

Fixing badly formatted addresses

For owners and admins. Some locations were typed all in one box, such as Portland, OR 97201 in City, or with the state written out. This tidies them into one style, and you see every change before it is made.

1. Open Patrons in the sidebar and press Fix addresses at the top of the list. Every patron with a City, State or ZIP is reviewed.
2. The list shows each proposed change, before and after, for City, State, ZIP and Country. Every row starts ticked. Untick any you do not want (or use Untick all).
3. Press Apply. Only the ticked rows change.

The style it uses:

• City in normal capitals (portland and PORTLAND become Portland). A city already in mixed capitals, such as DeKalb, is left as typed.
• State as the two-letter code (Oregon, Ore. and or become OR), including DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands.
• ZIP as 5 digits or ZIP+4 (972011234 becomes 97201-1234).
• Country United States when it was blank, US or USA.

It reads a location wherever it was typed: the state or ZIP in City, the ZIP in State, the state in ZIP, extra spaces and stray commas. In City, a state only counts after a comma, before a ZIP, or as a two-letter code in capitals, so Port Washington stays a city.

Needs a person. Anything it is not sure of is listed separately with the reason and is never changed: no state it recognizes, two different states or ZIP codes, a ZIP that is not 5 digits (a 4-digit ZIP that lost its leading zero is not guessed), a country other than the United States, or a value that is not a place name (very long, or holding characters a place name does not use). Patrons already in the right style are not listed at all.

Fixing a Needs a person row in place. You do not have to leave the list. Each Needs a person row has Edit beside it (and Open patron, if you would rather see the whole record):

1. Press Edit on the row. City, State, ZIP and Country open right there, filled in with what is on file, and the reason it was listed stays above them.
2. Type the correction - for example add OR as the State, or put the leading zero back on a ZIP - and press Save.
3. The row leaves the list, the need a person count drops by one, and the cursor moves to Edit on the next row, so you can work down the list.

What you type is tidied the same way as Apply (oregon becomes OR, a 9-digit ZIP becomes ZIP+4, a blank country becomes United States). If it still is not a location it can be sure of - no state it recognizes, two different states, a ZIP that is not 5 digits, a country that is not a two-letter code - Save is refused, the reason shows under the boxes, and nothing changes. Each saved fix is recorded the same way as Apply, and erased with the patron if they are erased. Cancel closes the boxes without saving.

Edited in between? If someone changes a patron after you opened the review, that patron is skipped with Changed since the review; review again, and their edit is kept. Press Fix addresses again for a fresh review.

Each change is recorded against the patron with who made it, when, and the old and new City, State, ZIP and Country. If that patron is later erased, those old and new values are erased with them; the gallery’s activity log keeps only that a fix was applied, by whom, when, and to how many patrons.

Naming the buyer when you sell a piece

In Artwork Catalog → Record sale, the Buyer box now starts with a search. Type part of the person’s name, email or phone; if they are already one of your patrons, pick them and the sale is theirs. If they are new, leave the search alone and fill in the buyer fields as before — the record is created for them, and if the email turns out to be on file already, the existing person is used rather than a second one made.

You can also skip the buyer entirely. A sale without a named buyer is recorded exactly as it always was.

A piece sold before, or sold without a name

On a sold piece in the catalog, press Buyer. You see the sale, who bought it (or No buyer named), and can Name the patron, Change them or Remove the name. Only the buyer changes here — the amount, the date and the artist’s payout stay where they are. Each change is written to the activity log.

If the sale came through Square, Owners, Admins and Treasurers also see Open the receipt in Square under it, which opens Square’s receipt for that payment in a new tab. Nobody else is sent the receipt. See Square.

A piece that sold before you kept records here

Loading your back catalog, you set a work to sold on its own record. That does not create a sale — only the record-sale flow and a Square sale do — so Buyer used to say “No sale is recorded for this piece” and leave you there.

Now, on a sold piece with no sale, Buyer offers Record a past sale: the amount, the date it actually sold, the patron who bought it, and a note. It goes in dated when it happened, so a piece that sold in 2019 reports in 2019 and does not appear in this year’s takings.

It is a record, not a transaction. No payout is created for the artist — they were paid, or were not, years ago, and inventing a liability now would be worse than recording nothing. Nothing is sent to QuickBooks or Square, and no order or receipt number is invented. Everywhere the two appear together, a recorded sale is marked Recorded, not transacted, so nobody has to guess which is which, now or in ten years.

You can fix it. A recorded entry’s amount, date, buyer and note can all be corrected, and the entry can be deleted outright — a typo is an ordinary mistake. A real transacted sale still cannot be edited here: its amount and date are the ledger’s, and the artist’s payout is worked out from them.

You are only offered this on a piece already marked sold. Recording history never changes a piece’s status behind you, and a piece by an artist whose membership has ended is frozen — the screen says so, and says how to change it.

A letter verifying a purchase (for an insurance claim)

When a buyer needs to claim on a piece that was stolen, lost, destroyed or damaged, the gallery can give them a Verification of Artwork Purchase letter on its letterhead.

1. Artwork Catalog → find the sold piece → Verification letter.
2. Choose What happened to it (Stolen, Lost, Destroyed in a fire or Damaged), the approximate date of the loss, and who is signing and their title. Your own name is filled in; change it if someone else signs.
3. Produce letter (PDF). The PDF downloads, and the letter is recorded.

Everything else comes from your records: the gallery’s name, logo, address, telephone and email, the buyer’s name, the artist, title, year, medium, dimensions and SKU of the piece, and the date and price of the sale. Nothing is filled in for you. If a fact is missing, no letter is produced and the box tells you which one and where to record it:

• No sale recorded for the piece. Record the sale first (Artwork Catalog → the piece → record it as sold).
• No named buyer, price or date on the sale. Name the buyer with Buyer (see above); fix the price or date on the sale.
• The gallery’s address, telephone or public contact email. Settings → Organization → Branding, under Contact details on emails (the telephone is Gallery telephone).
• The piece has no artist, title or SKU. Fix it on the piece.

If the piece has no year, medium or dimensions on record, that part is simply left out of the letter’s description line, never printed as a blank.

The letter says the gallery understands the piece was lost: “We understand that the artwork was subsequently stolen on or about …”. It confirms the gallery’s own sale record and the price. It does not say the gallery saw, or certifies, the loss. A sale that has a refund recorded against it, or a piece not marked sold, is refused.

Each letter issued is listed on that same screen (when, who, what the loss was). The record holds only references (the piece, the sale, the buyer, who issued it), not a copy of the buyer’s details, so erasing a buyer under Erasing someone leaves nothing behind that the erasure cannot reach. Producing the letter changes no sale, piece or patron record. It needs the Patrons module on, the artwork manage capability, and the Editor role or above.

What each person’s page shows

Their contact details, how and when they reached you, both consents, your notes, and what they bought, grouped by artist: one heading per artist with the number of pieces and the total, and each piece underneath linked to the catalog. Two pieces by one artist read as one line saying 2 pieces, not two lines to add up.

Email history

Below the purchases, Email history lists every email your gallery sent the person through Email Campaigns, newest first, with what happened to it: when it was sent, delivered, opened (and how many times), whether they clicked a link, and whether it bounced or was marked as spam. A person with no email address has no Email history.

Opens are approximate. An open is counted when the person’s mail app loads a tiny image in the email. Some apps block images, so a person can read the email without an open being counted; some privacy features load every message automatically, so an open can be counted that nobody made. No open recorded therefore does not mean the email went unread, and CartonCrew never treats it as a sign that the address is wrong or that the person wants no more mail.

Who collects each artist

On the Artists screen, each artist has a Collectors button. It lists every patron who owns their work, with how many pieces and when they last bought, each linked to the patron’s page. An artist whose sales have no named buyer shows No patrons yet — nothing is wrong, nobody has been named.

Member artists do not see this. In the member portal a sale is a sale — the piece shows as sold, and the buyer’s name and contact details are never sent there.

Erasing someone

Names, emails and phones are personal data, and a person is entitled to have them gone. Two ways, both complete:

You erase them. Open the person, press Erase (owners and admins only). A dialog in the app — not a browser pop-up — says exactly what will happen: their name, email, phone, address, notes and both consent records are removed, and they drop out of the newsletter audience; every sale and inquiry that named them stays in your books with no buyer attached. A register sale made under them also loses the card’s last four digits and the receipt number, so it can no longer be found by those at the register. A sale paid through Square loses its link to Square’s receipt (the receipt shows the buyer), and CartonCrew never fetches it again: the sale says Receipt not available - the buyer’s details were removed. A sale paid by check loses the name written on the check (the check number stays, so you can still match it to the bank statement). The payment you owe the artist for a piece they bought loses the buyer name and email taken at the sale. In their place the artist’s payout statement, the remittance email, the updated sold email, the artist’s My Sales (and its CSV) and your Sales list say Patron details removed for compliance reasons, with no email address, so nobody mistakes it for missing data. A sale whose buyer was never known still shows no buyer at all. The amounts, the status and the payout run are not touched. Only your gallery’s records change. Any record of a Fix addresses change to their City, State, ZIP or Country is removed too. Any reservation of a piece at your gallery made with their email address or phone number now says Patron details removed for compliance reasons, with no email or phone; the reservation itself, and any hold on the piece, stay as they were. Confirm, and it is done. It cannot be undone.

They erase themselves. Your public site’s footer carries Remove my details beside the newsletter signup. The visitor enters an email and gets the same sentence whatever they type; if the address is on file they receive a one-hour, single-use link that shows what will be removed and a confirm button. Confirming does exactly what your Erase button does. See the Studio Website guide.

Either way an entry is written to the audit — who erased (or that the person did it themselves), when, how many artist payments and how many reservations now read Patron details removed for compliance reasons, and a one-way hash of the email. The hash lets you answer “did you delete me?” with a yes or a no; it cannot be turned back into the address.

Who looked

Every time a member of staff opens a person’s page or lists people, an audit entry records who, when, and (for a list) how many came back — never the search term, which is often a name. An export records which choice and how many rows; a Fix addresses review counts as a list. Owners and admins can read the audit.

Who can do what

When it goes wrong

• “You do not have permission” — your role cannot write here (or, for Erase, is below admin); ask an admin.
• The sidebar entry is missing — the extension is off (Settings → Extensions) or your account lacks the Artwork Catalog permission.
• “Already on file — updated the existing …” — not an error. Somebody with that email had already inquired or signed up; their record now carries what you typed, and their original how they reached us is kept.