What's new in Elevent

Towards the end of this week, we officially push out Version 4 of Elevent. This marks the end of the Beta status of the new Box Office—and the legacy Box Office will be officially put on a raft, set out into the river, and someone will shoot a fire arrow at it and it’ll burn ceremoniously on a little boat and we’ll all feel sad. If only for a minute.

The last real chunk that needed to be made anew was refunds. The next time you do a refund, it will likely look completely different to you—and much better.

New Refunding is massively faster, less error-prone (and nothing is more error-prone than refunds), and will help with more reliable refund and exchange reporting.

Notably, donations can now be refunded as well.

Be cautious with this newfound power--if you auto-send tax deduction letters with each donation, you'll want to inform donors that they cannot claim the deduction if refunded.

Refunds in the older Box Office were just plain overelaborate. You can still refund only some items within an order and can refund only some of the amounts in an item, but we did remove the ability to refund a partial, custom amount of a sales tax or service charge. That’s just far too detailed and it was so very rarely done.

To keep up with industry standards and the ever-changing nature of ticketing, we are also no longer refunding Elevent fees on refunds. The dollar amounts involved are rarely significant, but what this does is greatly reduce many of the issues with refunds and reporting. Refunding a multi-party payment involved 3 separate operations—and now refunds involve just a single operation. It’s a huge improvement, system-wise and for clear, consistent reporting.

We ran the numbers and there’s nothing to suggest significant financial impact here. We are also forgoing any fee increases again this year, despite escalating inflation. If you still have concerns about this impact, you may consider applying a service charge on the act of refunding and incorporating that into your Refund/No-refund policy. Elevent support service charges on refunds and exchanges already.

Learn about new refunds here. Please visit the revamped Box Office Documentation section.

Before, when you created a new staff user, by default they would be set to expire after a year. This was causing some confusion when users would log in after a year and find they didn't have access to any part of the back or box office.

Now, when creating users, they will be set to never expire. However, for security reasons we strongly suggest considering setting an expiration date for users according to your policy.

You may have noticed already, but we added a "Website" button to your tile on the homepage of goelevent.com. In case any searchers are looking for your website where all the cool stuff happens, clicking this button will take them there.

The link comes from the Navbar Image link you already have set--the same destination users go to if they click on your logo on goelevent.com.

To further economize the agent's screen display in the Beta Box Office, if there is only one allocation in a show, the "Show All Allocations" toggle will be ghosted and unclickable. Since it wouldn't do anything anyways.

At the Premiere and Enterprise pricing tiers, Elevent can step up our preparation, support, and monitoring efforts to make sure your most critical on-sale windows and special events go off without a hitch.

We realize not every Premiere and Enterprise client knows they have this option; and conversely, relying on you, our fearless, overworked event presenters to mention this in chat or a meeting with us wasn't really happening as often as we'd like.

Now, any time you want to give us the heads up, just go to the Knowledgebase, find the "Request Hypercare Support…" article, and fill out the form. This'll trigger us to prep for the big day(s) and keep an eye on things.

What is Hypercare, anyways?

Looking ahead to Hypercare events, we get proactive. If we think your event might need a boost in either tech and/or human resources, we'll apportion what seems reasonable. We're in this together, don't forget--the better you do, the better we do.

The entire support team familiarizes themselves with your upcoming event in advance and remains vigilant during the hypercare window to respond speedily to any issues that arise.

• Premiere clients: Up to 16 hours of Hypercare per year
• Enterprise clients: Up to 40 hours of Hypercare per year

Subtle but important, we have been collecting data on returning users who might not realize they are indeed returning users. We saw a significant enough % of returning users who were getting a little turned around if they didn't realize they'd been here before--even when they see "Welcome Back" after entering their email.

For security reasons (e.g. brute force attacks), every system must exert caution about how much information they share. We have adopted compliant language when a user tries an incorrect password to guide them to reset their password if they are trying to login after forgetting they exist. We are already seeing the beneficial affects of this change.

It's a modest change--users can now add their birthday to their account as they edit their own information on their profile.

We have more plans in store to drive up collection of birthdays for users who wish to share them so you can reward them on their birthday. While it's now possible for users to self-report their birthday, don't expect to collect a ton of them simply from this change. But we expect you can sense where we're going with this.

After seeing some users get themselves into hot water--by customizing each Elevent Event in WordPress independent of customizing the whole event template--it was possible to temporarily create a situation where you might choose to stop keeping Elevent and your WordPress website synced up. That semi-defeats the purpose of having it fully integrated.

To guard against this, we decoupled an Event's description from the standard post content area of Elevent Events. In this way, you will be freed up to add/customize whatever text, block, or media content you want on each Elevent Event's post content area and keep syncing to your heart's content.

Changes in v0.4.6:

• Introduced a new, separate Description field. The Description from Elevent will now update the Description field instead of the default post content for Elevent Events. This makes it easy to highly customize the Elevent Event post content without it being overwritten on re-sync.
• Removed some unintentional debug info displaying on the new calendar views.
• Added custom color selection to taxonomies for color-coding events on the new calendar views.

For the web techies:

Important: For event descriptions to display the way you want, this update requires updates to Custom Fields and changes to any custom single-event-page templates the site currently uses. Back up your site before completing this update.

1. To update Custom Fields, re-import Custom Fields into ACF from the updated file found in the Docs. If you have made any customizations to Custom Fields on Elevent Events or Elevent Showtimes (You shouldn't), this re-import will wipe out those customizations. You have the option to re-apply your customizations or contact us via support--we'll tell you which manual changes to make to custom fields.
2. To update single-event custom templates, add the Description field/shortcode to your Elementor or WordPress template(s) in your child theme so it will display.

Please note that after updating, Description will no longer update Elevent Event post content. Future syncs will not show a description unless you take steps #1 and #2 above.

If, after update, you see a Description twice on event landing pages, delete the description in the Elevent Event post content. Future events will not have a description in 2 places.

In an effort to simplify discount management a little bit, for member discounts, we've hidden any archived or inactive memberships from the dropdown. You'll only see active memberships now.

Note that you'll need to temporarily reactivate any memberships you plan to use in the future if you want to set up discounts for those members.

Learn more about discounting for members here.

Here's a fun ticketing wonk phrase to add to your arsenal: "Late-night disambiguation". Late-night disambiguation is the art of making it clear to end-users exactly what day you're talking about.

Whether you have your own custom website integration (through the External Web API) or use the Elevent for WordPress plugin, instead of displaying 12:00 AM on the following day (technically correct but who has time to think about what that means), we'll display any midnight times as 11:59 PM--the last minute of that day.

While less technically correct, it's worth it to be a minute off to communicate clearly to end-users.