What's new in Elevent

Elevent for Salesforce v2.8 is out. It brings in all of a customer's addresses from Elevent, not just one, and gives you real control over where Elevent data lands in Salesforce: when you send an Elevent field to a field of your choosing, it now replaces the default instead of writing to both. The Field Mappings screen has been rebuilt to make all of that easier to see.

If you're upgrading and you've set up custom field mappings, read Before you upgrade below first.

Multiple Customer Addresses

Elevent customers can have a Billing address, a Mailing address and a Seasonal address. Until now, only one of them made it into Salesforce.

Now all three sync:

• Billing goes where it always has: the contact's (or person account's) Other Address, unless you've mapped it elsewhere.
• Mailing and Seasonal go to new Elevent Mailing and Elevent Seasonal fields. Your standard Salesforce Mailing Address is left alone, because the addresses your team has carefully collected in Salesforce are often the ones you trust most.

Add the new fields to your contact or person account page layouts to see them.


When a customer removes an address in Elevent, its fields are cleared in Salesforce. Existing customers' Mailing and Seasonal addresses fill in the next time that customer changes in Elevent; reprocessing older Elevent Updates won't fill them in.

Custom Field Mappings Now Replace the Default

The Field Mapping tool lets you send an Elevent field to a Salesforce field of your choosing. Before v2.8, Elevent kept updating the default field too, so you couldn't really stop Elevent from writing to it.

Now a custom mapping replaces the default. The default field keeps whatever value it already has, but Elevent stops updating it.

A few fields can't be remapped, because the app relies on them to match customers, create records and calculate totals: a contact's Elevent ID, Email, Last Name and Last Updated in Elevent, for example. These show a lock icon.


A Redesigned Field Mappings Screen

In Salesforce, switch to the Elevent app and open Field Mappings.


Each Elevent field now has one row with a single picker, a note of the default it replaces, search, and filters:

• Remapped: fields you've sent somewhere else. The default shown under each one is no longer updated.
• Needs attention: mappings the app can't apply, such as two Elevent fields sent to the same Salesforce field, or a field that's been deleted. Until you fix one, that Elevent value isn't saved anywhere, so fix these first. When a custom mapping collides with an active default, the default mapping wins. These problems are also recorded in Error Logs.
• Fixed: fields that can't be remapped.


Every change is checked before it's saved, and a change that would cause a problem is blocked with an explanation.

Before You Upgrade

If you use custom field mappings:

1. In Elevent Settings, turn off Enable Processing of Imported Data. Leave imports on so new data waits in line.
2. Upgrade.
3. Open Field Mappings and check Remapped and Needs attention on each object mapping. Update any flows, validation rules, reports or integrations that read a default field that's no longer updated.
4. Turn processing back on.

Upgrades can't be undone, so try it in a sandbox first if you have one. Full steps are in the Admin Guide under Updating the App.

Also in This Release

v2.8 includes the v2.7 changes:

• Payment details on Elevent Orders and their opportunities: payment method, last 4 digits and card expiration date. Full card numbers are never stored.
• SKU on merchandise products.

Bug Fixes:

• Number and Checkbox fields can now be chosen as custom mapping destinations.
• Choosing a different record type in the Field Mapping tool now saves, and custom objects now show their record types.

Elevent for Salesforce v2.5 is out. The headline feature is a much-needed feature that adds some additional settings you can set to have the Elevent app self-manage deletion and cleanup of older files. This is a huge piece towards making sure the Elevent for Salesforce app doesn't use more Salesforce storage space than it needs to.

Elevent Update Auto-Purging

When Elevent for Salesforce syncs data in from Elevent, it uses a 2-step process to make sure your data stays protected and up-to-date.

1. First, all the new data--customers (contacts), items purchased (opportunities), orders, etc. is imported into an object called Elevent Updates. This in in-progress data--nothing you'll see yet in the data you use.
2. Next, those Elevent Updates are processed. This is where the Elevent for Salesforce app checks to see if contacts and other data already exist, checks to make sure the new data is indeed newer, etc.

The history of these Elevent Updates is really useful when troubleshooting anything that doesn't look as expected. They don't get deleted after processing for that reason.

As the weeks and months pile up, those Elevent Updates can start to take up a lot of room in your very constrained Salesforce org. Auto-purging to the rescue.

In Salesforce, switch to the Elevent app.

In the Elevent Settings panel, you'll see the new Log Cleanup section.

Enable it (Highly recommended). The default retention period is 30 days, but you can change it. Press the button and tweak it to your liking.

Note this only auto-purges those in-progress records like Elevent Updates. This will not touch the customer and opportunity data you actually rely on. Also, it will only delete Elevent Updates that are Successful or Ignored--if something might have had an issue, those will remain until manually deleted.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug causing overuse of imported data when updating the LastUpdatedDateTime stamp. This was the main bug causing storage use to grow over time.
• Fixed a scheduled job status display bug: Job wouldn’t show as scheduled in the settings component even when it is.

With this update from v2.3 to v2.4, we've introducing a set of improvements to improve the data sync, adding some small features, and bringing in ticket data as product types. Along with the usual set of bug fixes.

New option: Don't Import Entries

Entries, often called check-ins or scans, can be a ton of data. In an org like Salesforce, where data usage is very limited, it can mount up to a lot of data usage you don't value.

If you aren't planning to use the data about each person's actual attendance, you can check a box in the Elevent Custom Setting to "Skip Entries Import".

Ticket Products are Now Imported

In Salesforce, the app creates unique products for every other type of item but tickets--these are the 'SKUs' of your product mix.

Now, Tickets also get created. These are the types of tickets you sell (and used to sell or issue)--associated with the opportunities of their actual issuance to each attendee.

Imported Data Ignored Before Cutoff Date

In the Elevent Salesforce app, you can set a cutoff data where all sales before that cutoff date will be ignored.

Imported customers and auto-assigned items, however, have no purchase date--so they weren't being ignored if they were imported before the cutoff date. We're talking about data imported into Elevent.

Now, imported data before the cutoff date will also be ignored if it happens before the cutoff date you specify.

The default address from Elevent will now map to Other Address

While you could already change this using the Field Mapping tool in our Salesforce app, we changed the default mapping of addresses from Elevent into Other Address. The carefully collected addresses of contacts in Salesforce are often more valued than the billing address from purchases; by changing this default, we tread more carefully around addresses that might already exist.

Concessions & Merch Added to Order Rollup

The calculated values for tangible items wasn't being populated

Changed all API URLs to the new elevent.app

Has no noticeable effect other than future-proofing.

Bug Fixes:

• On-demand processing will now also use the configured batch size.
• Removed a bug stopping changes to field mapping in the field mapping tool
• Partially saved Elevent Update ignored on retry.
• Address line 2 was getting dropped during processing.
• Fix field mapping concession references.
• Fix person account User ID mapping causing query row limit.

We are officially out of Beta and live with our major new update to our Elevent for Salesforce app. Version 2.x goes live and generally available as V2.3. Check us out on the Salesforce appExchange (Where we are one of only 2 ticketing systems with reserved seating capability).

If you were on v1 of our Salesforce app, you likely have already been upgraded or are in the process of being upgraded. Reach out to us if you haven't been scheduled for upgrade yet.

What is V2 All About?

Almost everything about our Salesforce app is optimized, reworked, improved, or added-in. The driving force moving from version 1 to 2 was to:

• Add in the rest of the useful data, making the CRM integration comprehensive and complete]
• Adding tools and power to the integrators, giving them more flexibility and more compatibility with other data sources
• Adding compatibility with other types of Salesforce clouds, most notably Nonprofit Cloud
• Making the integration more reliable, robust, and error-free
• Using a new Elevent API as a data source purpose-built for CRM integration
• Improved handling for all of the edge case, less common events like shared memberships, transfers, order reassignments, gifts, refunds, exchanges, and more.

New Features & Functionality

You can read the release notes and Admin Guide to get a full sense of what v2 brings. These are the highlights:

• A new field mapping tool to give integrators the ability to map Elevent data to different record types and fields
• A re-imagined importing & processing engine to better handle the ever-evolving world of incoming data, with more feedback and statuses of updates
• All sorts of additional data from Elevent, including:
  • Entries for every scan or check-in
  • Custom order fields, for all those custom forms and questions you serve up in Elevent
  • Events with all of their event info
  • More robust showtimes
  • Venues
  • Products - like the SKU for each product, with GL Codes
  • Elevent Orders - now a fully-fledged object in Salesforce
  • Concessions & Merch products & sales
• Helpful tracking fields like Elevent status, links back to elevent customers and orders, and a flag for contact records originally created in Elevent, and most recent activity dates
• New rollups on showtimes, events, and orders
• A new action button to "Merge dupe contacts" in Elevent as well as Salesforce
• More robust contact matching by more than just Elevent ID
• Support for Nonprofit cloud and person accounts/decoupling from Salesforce NPSP (Nonprofit Success Pack)
• Multi-person memberships are now associated as primary and secondary members using Salesforce Contact Roles.
• Support added for anonymous orders; they come in with no associated contact or account
• Donations support more information, including anon donation flags and tributes/acknowledgments
• Support for reserved seating tickets

Where do we go from here?

We're not done with our Salesforce app, to be sure. With such a solid data foundation, we move next to:

• Improving our turnkey support for more of Nonprofit Cloud, most notably gifts and campaigns
• Offering a suite of out-of-the-box page layouts, dashboards, reports, custom fields, rollups, and flows to help quickstart integrations and cut down on the amount of idea generation and customization required to get a lot out of our app.
• Continuing to improve shared memberships--creating a more full separation between the memberships that are purchased with the memberships that are serviced.
• Adding Elevent emails and deliveries into the Salesforce activity feed to form a more complete picture of every customer touchpoint
• Adding support for saved orders and reservations
• Continued improvements to refund, exchange, and gift handling
• Escheatment support for unclaimed gift items
• Leveraging Agentforce and our AI-driven future
• Customer/contact & allocation/segment bidirectionality between Elevent and Salesforce
• Some data management tools to reduce the amount of storage used

Salesforce, and our app, is a big mammajamma. Reach out to us anytime to get to know the enterprise CRM-side of what we can do for you.

Elevent supports guest checkout, both online and through the box office. However, when system integrators request from the API all recent activity under customers, these anonymously-purchases items aren't included in the response.

We've added a Get All Anonymous Orders call to the API to round out the full picture of tickts and donations sold, to known customers and no one in particular.

This anonymous data is already retrieved by the Elevent for Salesforce app, to help complete your progress reporting against your campaigns and goals.

Elevent for Salesforce v1.1 is available. This version includes:

 

Improvement

  

Automatic tracking of field history on Elevent custom objects

The app will now automatically set up field tracking on Elevent custom objects. This makes the sync more transparent. Elevent objects can be viewed on a record’s History-related list or through History reports. For each field, field tracking logs the date and time of change, the user making the change, the old and new values, and introduces the ability to undo a change.

You'll be able to review the update history in the Related tab on each Elevent Update

 

Improvement

  

Elevent for Salesforce will no longer require bleeding-edge versions of NPSP to install

The app will now install and upgrade with less-recent versions of the Non-Profit Success Pack (NPSP) extensions. This became a burden as the NPSP install link has more recently trailed the latest release of NPSP by a number of weeks, causing confusion.

Current NPSP version dependency is NPSP v3.223

 

Fix

  

Adjusted the automatic setting of Last Imported data on On-Demand Imports to reach back 1 day further

Frequent users of On Demand importing data could get confused if no data was being imported when there had been some recent updates. Manually setting Last Imported Data wasn't so intuitive, so this fix will agree better with the API and get all data.

Note, this might result in more duplicate entries of the in-process records in Elevent Customer Updates, but do not be alarmed--the actual, useable processed accounts, contacts, and opportunities will not be duplicated.

 

Fix

  

Avoiding conflict during concurrent scheduled and on-demand processing

It's possible to get this error message: unable to obtain exclusive access to this record” error.This is a Salesforce conflict that could get caused when a scheduled process and an on-demand process try to run at the same time. This fix avoids the conflict, which is really a false alarm.