Thumbnails, More Data, Tier Display Added
Hi! Nick Gray here with an exciting week of updates.
It’s been just over a week since we launched our updated database, and we’ve been incredibly busy adding even more features and data.
This week alone, we’ve added 25,000 new contribution records and rolled out several enhancements to make PatronView even more powerful.
Let me walk you through what’s new.
Visual Thumbnails for Source Documents
Mohamed added a nice feature that makes it much easier to verify and explore our data sources: visual thumbnails.
Every patron record now displays thumbnail images of the actual source documents where their donations were found. This means you can: * Quickly see the original annual report page * Verify the context of each donation record * Get a visual sense of how institutions present their donor lists * Build trust in our data by seeing the primary sources This visual reference system makes PatronView more transparent and user-friendly. Plus, the institutions do a great job with graphic design - it’s fun to see the cover pages at the bottom of someone’s donor info page.
New Data Added
We’ve had a good week of data expansion, adding thousands of new patron records from major New York cultural institutions:
- Carnegie Hall - Complete annual reports from 2015 through 2024 (9 years of data!)
- Museum of the City of New York - 8 years of records from 2010-2018
- New York Transit Museum - 2020-2021 donor records Thanks to Alexis for processing a lot of these, and Mohamed for verifying the data inputs. Each of these sources contains hundreds to thousands of individual patron records, significantly expanding our coverage of New York’s cultural philanthropy landscape.
Hierarchical Tier Display
Patron contribution pages now display the full donation hierarchy with clickable navigation.
I’m still trying to figure out how to best display the tiers and subtiers (and sometimes sub-subtiers), but we’ve got a rudimentary listing now.
What this means is that when you view a patron’s contributions, you can now see not just their main donation tier, but also: * Sub-tiers (like “Gold Circle” within “Benefactor”) * Sub-sub-tiers (even more granular categorizations) Each level is clickable, taking you directly to that tier’s page.
This gives you a much clearer picture of exactly where each patron fits within an institution’s giving structure. It’s particularly useful for understanding the nuances between similar donation levels.
Tier Descriptions
Which brings us to the next part: we’ve added detailed descriptions for over 100 donation tiers, with plans to expand this to the entire database.
You’ll start to see what benefits each tier includes, minimum donation requirements, special recognition levels, and exclusive access or privileges offered.
This context helps you understand not just who is donating, but what their support level actually means at each institution.
Minor Updates
We’ve also rolled out several behind-the-scenes improvements:
- Improved data accuracy - Continuous corrections and cleanup throughout the week. I think our internal numbers show close to 99% accuracy based on our source files, but I’m not ready to officially claim that yet.
- Enhanced 404 tracking - Finally fixed our Plausible analytics integration for better error monitoring to help with “Page Not Found” errors from old search engine archives.
- Build infrastructure upgrades - Switched to Cloudflare’s pre-installed Node 22, reducing build times by ~35 seconds. This was just a fun thing for me to play with Claude Code on. It included moving from Bun to pnpm, implementing smart change detection, optimized asset handling, and more. TBD if this is actually helpful or if it even worked!
As always, feedback is welcome. This project continues to grow thanks to your support and suggestions. Thanks for reading.