Enhanced Patron Profiles, Fund Leaderboards, Quick Facts

The past 10 days at PatronView have been fun. We’re reaching record-high traffic numbers now, perhaps thanks to my announcement on LinkedIn and talking about it on my X account.

Patron profiles are richer and we added some new ways to explore our data. Here’s an overview of what’s new this week in our museum fundraising database.

🎯 Enhanced Patron Profiles

I made custom patron profile pages for a few dozen friends. The goal is to test whether people find value in something like another social network, but this one might be based on philanthropy.

Profile Photos, Bios & Social Links

These new enhanced patron profiles have photos, brief biographical information, links to social media profiles, and links to a few blog posts by the person.

These new profile pages are also the first time that we’re showing related patrons, a feature I’ve been wanting to roll out to the entire website.

Here are a few enhanced profiles to explore: Austin Rief, Chris Petkas, Chris Sparling, Ania Wysocka, Cathryn Lavery, Adam Robinson, Alex Lieberman, and Edwin Dorsey.

🏆 Fund Leaderboards

We’ve added a new “Fund Leaderboards” section to the PatronView homepage, sitting right beneath the patron leaderboards. This module shows you the most popular funds and programs across New York’s cultural institutions, ranked by the number of contributors, recent contributions, etc.

The concept of “funds” is what we also call Tiers in our database. It’s a bit complicated, and I have to think through the logic even myself, but basically:

Each donation or contribution gets attributed to a Fund. A fund is composed of a few different tiers, or levels. I’m getting sleepy just writing even this part out, so I’ll come back and explain how we sort donations another day!

Visual Institution Identifiers

Mohamed integrated custom favicons for all 16 major institutions in our database. We needed a way to add logos for each museum in a standard, scalable way. It was his idea to pull the favicons, which I think is really smart!

See them displayed on the Institutions page here. Or on the home page, inside the Funds Leaderboard. Each fund now displays with its institution’s favicon, making it easy to quickly identify which museum or organization runs each program.

📊 Quick Facts for Active Patrons

We’ve upgraded some of the larger patron pages with a few small improvements that make them more informative and easier to navigate.

For patrons with 8 or more contributions in our database, like this couple, we now display a “Quick Facts” box at the top of their profile. This gives you an instant overview of their philanthropic activity.

What’s Included

• Total database entries – How many times they appear in our records
• Earliest contribution – Their first recorded donation with the specific tier name
• Latest contribution – Their most recent giving with program details
• Largest donation – If we have monetary amounts, we show their biggest gift

This is just a simple database output. I’d love to use some AI to write summaries of each patron, but I have to be careful in how we do that. I hope to experiment with that soon and do a full human review for each summary that we write.

🗂️ Organized Contribution Categories

Some of our big patrons have 20+ contributions listed on their profile pages. Or over 100, like Mimi Haas here.

I wanted a way to split out various contributions so they don’t all run together in chronological order. So we’ve reorganized how contributions appear now, breaking them into clear categories that make it easier to understand someone’s involvement in different areas.

New Section Breakdown

• Boards & Directors – Board memberships and director positions
• Committees – Committee participation and leadership roles
• Councils – Council memberships and advisory positions
• Other Contributions – All other donations and support

This categorization helps you quickly see not just what someone has given, but how they’re involved in governance and leadership across institutions.

Nick’s Note: I’m not sure if this is the best or right order to display, so maybe we should change it! What do you think? Email me to nick@patronview.com if you think we should put Other Contributions up top, for example.

🔍 Smart 404 Error Handling

Finally, and in the “Least Important But Fun to Build” category, I spent almost 10 hours making a custom Cloudflare Worker and some Astro scripts to implement intelligent error handling to better process 404 errors.

This all stemmed from our new database launch last month that accidentally changed the URLs for thousands of old Patron and Fund pages that Google had indexed. We had over 25,000 pages indexed, but Google had assigned this domain a very low crawl budget. And so it wasn’t re-crawling our sitemaps to get the new URLs, and the old URLs were giving soft 404 errors (not true 404s) – sometimes 10 or 20 times a day.

In addition to fixing the soft 404s to go to hard 404s, I saw an opportunity to try to convert some of those 404s into 301 redirects for better SEO… but only if we could accurately guess the new URLs. Which we can do about 80% of the time.

Fuzzy Matching for URLs

Now, if you find an old version of a patron’s name or a fund URL in Google, the scripts we made will:

• Automatically search our internal database for the closest match
• Rank a variety of the matches based on likelihood to origin
• Pick the one with the best results to what you wanted
• Redirect you to the right page with a proper 301 redirect
• Remember successful redirects for faster performance in Cloudflare Workers KV

Cloudflare Workers for Old Links

I also deployed my very first Cloudflare Worker, which is neat. The worker handles outdated URLs from old sitemaps and search engine indexes that were routing to a specific subdirectory. If you click an old link to /subtiers/ or /sub-subtiers/ paths, you’ll automatically be redirected to the correct /funds/ page.

This means fewer dead ends and more successful searches, whether you’re coming from Google, Bing, or an old bookmark.

What’s Next

I never know what to write in this section each week. The story is always the same: We’re working on big expansions to the database, adding tens of thousands of new records, and hopefully making lots more profile pages. I have no idea what we’ll actually ship, but I hope to surpass 400,000 total contributions by the time of our next update.

Say Hi on LinkedIn if you are still reading. And thanks for your support!

– Nick Gray