SPONSA 2.0 - A New Look

SPONSA 2.0 is finally here! And it's the biggest update we've ever made.

You might remember a brief sneak peek of SPONSA 2.0 already, with the new navigation (header, footer and sidebar) and the redesigned Settings tabs. Those updates were built to look and feel more reactive and cohesive, and in a way that lets us build on them and act on your feedback quickly.

We've now given that same treatment to two of the most important pages you and your supporters spend time on: your Creator Main Page and the Goal Detail View. Almost every change below came out of creator feedback, so if you've ever sent us a message about something that annoyed you, there's a decent chance you're about to see it fixed!

Nothing has changed about how SPONSA works. You can still run as many goals at once as you like, and you still keep 95% of every tip. This update is about everything around that.

This is also our first set of patch notes! We'll publish these whenever we ship something big enough to be worth your time. Their home is the new "What's New" category in our Help Desk, which will keep a running log of past and future releases so you can always see what's changed.

Your main page has had a glow up. Your banner now stretches the full width of your profile, and the redundant profile picture that used to sit on the banner is gone. Your profile card now shows your social links and tags right at the top, rather than tucked away at the bottom where they were easy to miss.

The edit experience has been brought in line with the rest of 2.0. There's a pencil button at the top of your About card, and it opens everything in one place: profile picture, display name, username, bio, tags and social links. It's the same editing you already know from your Settings tab, now matched to the new design.

Your banner has its own edit button sitting right on it, redesigned to match, so you're not hunting through settings to change it.

Your goal grid has had the most work of anything on the page.

You can now drag your goals into any order you like. Grab a card and move it wherever you want it. This has been one of the most requested features from beta creators, and it's finally here.

The rest of the grid has been refreshed too:

The goal cards themselves are more useful at a glance:

Every card still carries its own buttons for pinning, sharing, editing, copying the OBS overlay URL, deleting and marking complete.

And completing a goal isn't final any more. Cards in your Completed tab now have a Reactivate button, which moves a goal back to your Active tab and reopens it for tips - useful if you marked something complete a bit early, or you want to run the same goal again.

This is the page supporters land on when they open one of your goals, and it's had a lot of attention in 2.0:

The progress bar now has three states rather than one:

That last one's especially useful for donothons, where going over the target is the whole point. The bar used to sit at the same colour either way, so at a glance you wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between hitting your goal and doubling it.

Deleting a tip message works properly now. In the past, deleting a message removed the whole event from view. Now, deleting a message keeps the tip and its amount exactly where they are, and simply renames the tipper to Anonymous and removes their message.

We've also renamed this section to Tips & Messages, because it now shows every tip you receive, including those left without a message. Previously those didn't appear here at all. Messages also display with their line breaks intact now, so they read the way the supporter wrote them.

Not strictly part of 2.0, but still worth mentioning - Ryft is a new payment option rolling out alongside PayPal. If you're set up with it, your supporters can pay by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, and your tips pay out straight to your bank account rather than sitting in a PayPal balance.

Ryft also brings refunds: if a supporter ever needs their tip back, you can now issue the refund yourself from your Insights page.

It's invite-only for now while we gather feedback from creators, and PayPal isn't going anywhere. The full guide, including how the fees compare, is here: Getting Paid with Ryft. If you'd like early access, drop us a message on Twitter/X or at support@sponsa.app and we'll get you set up.

If you're reading this as a creator, here's the section to send to your community.

The tip form is simpler than it was. Enter an amount, add your name or leave it as Anonymous, and write a message if you'd like to. There are two checkboxes: one to tip anonymously, and one to send a message only the creator will read. Both explain themselves with help text if you're not sure which is which.

Depending on the creator, you might see more ways to pay. Some creators are now set up with Ryft, a new payment option we're rolling out alongside PayPal, which lets you pay by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay without needing a PayPal account. PayPal is still available on every page.

When your tip goes through, you get a confirmation with confetti, and the goal's progress bar animates from where it was to where your tip has just moved it, with the numbers counting up as it goes (our favourite part of the update!)

If you'd rather support a creator without picking a specific goal, there's a Send a General Tip option that drops down on their main page. It's clearly labelled "This tip won't be linked to any goal", so you always know when you're tipping the creator generally rather than funding a specific goal. It's a small thing, but it makes it much harder to tip the wrong place by accident.

A few smaller things worth mentioning:

A few things we're working on next:

We don't have dates for any of these just yet, but each one will get written up here when it goes live.

Everything above came out of creator feedback, so thank you, truly. This update has been months in the works and only happened because you took the time to tell us what worked well, what didn't, and what could be better.

Please keep doing it - anything that feels wrong, anything that's missing, anything that didn't do what you expected it to, we want to hear about it, and the small annoyances are just as useful as the big ones - most of this update came from small annoyances (including our own as creators!)

Our Twitter/X DMs are the quickest way to reach us, and they're always open. You can also email us at support@sponsa.app. You're always welcome to come straight to me.

Thank you for sticking with us through the beta~ 🥳

~Shabir SPONSA | Founder