A patron is a CRM record for a person at your venue — a ticket buyer, a donor, or both. It's distinct from a Noctern user account: a patron can exist with no login at all (someone who bought a gift certificate for a friend, or gave by check), and a single person's patron record is what ties their giving and ticket history together over time.
The screenshots in this guide use the light theme, which is the default. If your app is showing dark mode, click the sun icon at the top right to switch back to light.
Before you start
- Venue Admin with the canViewDonors capability, or Super Admin, is required to open the Patrons list.
- Box office staff can look up and create patrons from the box office panel without this capability, but they don't see the full Patrons list or giving data.
How patrons are created
Automatically — a patron record is created the first time someone buys a ticket or makes a donation at your venue, matched by email where possible.
Manually — box office staff can create a patron inline while looking up a customer.
By import — bringing Contacts over from a previous system creates patrons in bulk. See the Importing Patron Data topic.
The patron list
Go to AdminVenuesPatrons.
Search by name or email in the Search name or email field, or filter by a tag in the Tag field.
Sort by Name, Lifetime giving, Ticket spend, or Most recent gift.
Check Has given or Recurring to narrow the list to donors or active sustainers, or set Mailing status to Do not mail / Mail returned to find patrons whose postal address needs attention.
Click Possible duplicates to open the duplicate-review queue, or Import to bring in Contacts from a previous system.
The table shows Name, Email, Lifetime giving, Ticket spend, Last gift, Household, and Tags (with a Recurring chip for active sustainers). It does not show order counts or year-by-year giving splits — those rollups live on the patron's own detail page and on their household's page.
Key fields
- Tags — freeform labels you define for segmentation, like "Board" or "Major Donor."
- External refs — if this patron came from an import, their id in the previous system is kept on the Details tab so re-imports stay idempotent instead of creating duplicates.
- Lifetime giving / Lifetime ticket spend — running totals kept up to date automatically as gifts and orders come in.
If a patron's record shows ticket spend but you can't find a matching Noctern order, check their Tickets tab — some of that spend may be pre-Noctern history brought in by import, which is labeled separately and never counted as Noctern revenue.
Exporting the list
Click Export list to open the Export patron list dialog.
Check Mailing export for one row per household with address columns, and optionally Exclude do-not-mail patrons or Exclude returned-mail patrons.
Click Download CSV.
Exports are capped at 5,000 rows. If your venue has more patrons than that, narrow your search or tag filter first — the export respects whatever filters are active on the list.
Watch out
If you open a patron and land on a different record than the one you searched for, that patron was merged into another one. Noctern redirects you to the surviving record automatically — see the Reviewing and Merging Duplicate Patrons topic.
- Open the demo venue's Patrons list and sort by Lifetime giving.
- Search for a patron by first name, then by email, and confirm the same record comes up.
- Open the Export patron list dialog and check the Mailing export option — don't download unless you want a real CSV.