What's new in Elevent

We've made some quality of life improvements to the Extra Customer Search tool. This handy little tool makes it easy to find any voucher bundle, individual voucher within a bundle, universal voucher, and gift card.

This tool has a lot of uses beyond looking extras up. You can transfer vouchers, assign them to people, print, export, or tag customers in Mailchimp who have a certain voucher.

• Added the ability to search for and locate a voucher by searching for the 'redemption' code It works for any kind of voucher, including universal vouchers and vouchers in a voucher bundle.

• Added a filter to include used vouchers. Now you can research and find any vouchers that have already been used up to get something.

• This tool now shows the order code for any voucher sold or issued as part of a proper order. You can click on the order code to go right to it. You'll see them in the same column as the reference you might add to universal vouchers.

Learn more about the Extra Customer Search tool here.

• Added some spans with unique IDs to the calendar legend showtime list and calendar; this makes it easier to target and style or hide individual legend options.

• Amended the [elevent_promo_event_date] shortcode, often used in an Event Grid, to automatically show a date range instead of individual dates when there are showtimes on > 3 different days. This includes handling for on-demand, virtual showtimes that are available over a range of dates and non-contiguous schedules.

• Added support for API pagination of showtimes when > 50 showtimes exist for a single event.
• Added a solution for API pagination of events when > 50 future, ticketable events exist
• Lots of background work done preparing for the next phase of the plugin
• File restructuring within the plugin

You may have noticed a change when in the Back Office, Box Office, or Entry.

We've moved!

It really shouldn't impact you--we are still redirecting users from the older URLs to these new ones and will continue to do so for a long, long time. Still, if you have any bookmarks, links, firewall rules, or anything else that links to a non-customer Elevent user app, you might want to update those.

Note that the customer-facing goelevent.com has not moved--any analytics or marketing/website links you have to any customer-facing pages have not changed.

Most importantly, it would be strongly recommended to update any 3rd-party integrations since the URLs to our APIs have also moved.

https://api.goelevent.com has become https://api.elevent.app/

Before you get alarmed, we will continue to receive calls to the same API at https://api.goelevent.com for a long time. But one day in the distant future, that URL will be retired. It's recommended you create a task or do a quick update to update that reference in any custom or third-party integrations you have that use the Elevent API.

Credentials--those physical and/or digital whatevers you give out to more-than-ticket buyers. And boy have we seen a wide array of those whatevers: badges, laminates, wristbands, stickers, labels, pull-'em-up-on-my-phone, and my personal favorite: stick-pin buttons. 20 points to whomever came up with that--you know who you are.

While it was technically possible to create a credential on memberships beforehand, they really didn't do much of anything. Few really carry around a membership card these days. Elevent does such a good job of recognizing members on all channels, knowing a membership number really wasn't very necessary.

There are a couple of good reasons to construct a more useful membership credential--so that's what we've done. It's more of a new feature than an improvement, to be honest.

Setting Them Up

This change is available to anyone who has credentials enabled. It's quite simple--go to any membership, the credential in the sub-menu, and enable it.

That's pretty much it. You can choose a standard print layout and determine if you'll supply membership cards physically, digitally, or both.

Swipe/Scan Member Cards

One of the cool bonuses of these membership credentials is you can scan them at the Box Office and it'll pull up that member quickly. Just scan their card while you are in the Search bar.

They print and can be managed like any credential. Do note that memberships don't grant entry to anything; other than quick customer search at the box office, they don't scan at the door.

To put these in play at your org, get going here.

Some smaller changes you may have noticed in recent weeks:

• There's a new column in our Airtable event import template. Now, if you are using VEE+ or have your own CineSend account for video streaming, you can ingest videos directly in CineSend and import the CineSend asset IDs from Airtable
• You can now see events with over a 4-hour runtime for longer in the Box Office
• Hid used or archived ticket packages, passes, and extras from the customer detail screen in the Box Office. This should unclutter that screen somewhat for your longer-standing repeat customers
• Added a TotalPrice field to the Get Anonymous Orders call in the Elevent API (to make it consistent with known-customer orders)
• Added "Virtual" venue as a filter selection (venue) in the Event Sales Report. Now you can more easily view ticket sales to each event for only online programming.
• Fixed a bug in the Customer Gift Redemption Excel export.
• Fixed a bug and made performance and fidelity improvements with Redemption (check-in) counts
• Added clearer messaging to the Box Office agent when a voucher code fails. Instead of always reporting that "Extra voucher code not found", it will now report when a gift card balance is insufficient, when a voucher has already been used, and when a universal voucher has been assigned to a different customer.
• Prevented the visual shifting that happened when a customer was selecting seats in reserved seating. The newly-selected ticket for a seat would instantly bubble to the top. That was abrubt and disorienting, so now tickets stay where they are in the display.

For tech nerds and 3rd party integrators

For CRMs and other systems that integrate to Elevent via our full API, it was difficult to accurately interpret the life of items when some advanced post-transaction activity occurred. We're talking about those more occasional events such as:

• Gifts
• Transfers
• Orders re-associated from one buyer to another
• Imported items

To help external systems piece together the whole story, we've added a Purchaser object and OwnershipType to the API customer responses.

For instance, if a customer bought a "Secondary" pass, they might see this bit of data underneath their customer node:

The Purchaser node makes it clear who the original purchaser was (And who actually spent money). This makes it possible to correctly construct a history where one person bought things and other people ended up with the custody of those items--and the possible relationships between the two.

OwnershipType tells you what happened--was this a first-party "Purchase", as in the example above, or was it Gifted, Transfererd, Imported, or something else.

You will not see Purchaser or OwnershipType on donations, concessions, or merchandise since they have a simpler post-purchase lifespan.

These new nodes are not included in the API endpoint for Anonymous Orders because…well, they're anonymous. We don't know. And neither should you.

To explore the Elevent API Docs, knock yourself out here.

We have released Version 5.0 of Elevent. This major release contains a collection of some large new features we'll be detailing in the coming weeks and months.

• Reserved/Assigned Seating 2.0: An entire overhaul of Reserved Seating with some of the best customer-facing interactivity, a more interactive seat selection process, with venues and seat plans that are more spatially representative and customizable to your specific venues
• New, expanded API optimized for more in-depth CRM integrations. And on that note…
• Elevent for Salesforce 2.0 (now in security review, coming to an org near you)
• eWallet support for tickets: Apple and Android
• The seedlings for an updated Back Office UI

A lot of this list are full new subsystems, not just features. We'll be introducing them in more detail on their own.

When you login for the first time today, you'll likely notice the navbar at the top and the main menu in Elevent Back Office look different.

We've opted for a darker, more high-contrast design and we've made the styling more consistent throughout.

On the main menu, we've made room to un-bury some hard to miss functions like venues, sales channels, credentials, and widgets so they're harder to miss.

This is just a start--we'll be working our way down into some of the detail pages of the Back Office to make them more intuitive and organized. Years of adding new features has rendered many of these pages (and there are a lot of them) a bit haphazard in form and function.

While it's common to have service charges that apply across all of your showtimes, there are situations where a certain segment of your showtimes have a different set of service charges. This may be when a certain venue collects a restoration fee, when you rent out your own venue, or just have a different service charge policy for a different series or group of events.

You can override service charges for an individual showtime from the Quick Links you see from the Showtime Details page in the Back Office.

To help simplify configuration and management of these non-standard showtimes, when you copy one showtime to create additional showtimes just like it, the custom service charges for that showtime will also copy over.

Copying Showtimes is easy and can save you tons of time. Learn more about how to copy showtimes here.

The Slack Daily Summary is a great way to keep the pulse of your daily sales activity on any device. I don't know about you, but they're part of my morning routine: glance at the daily slack, make sure yesterday's sales look in line with what I'd expect.

Concessions & Merchandise were added after we created this Slack integration. So we've gone back and added concessions & merch info to this daily update alongside all the other product lines. If you don't see it, make sure to press "Show more" in Slack--Slack auto-hides each post after a certain number of lines.

Visit this article to learn more about enabling the Slack integration.