What's new in Elevent

Tickets can no longer walk around the place, acting superior to other products. Like tickets, membership cards and scannable passes can also be added to a user's Apple or Google wallet--in lieu of any printing or email searching.

This opens up a host of new possibilities, in addition to the obvious customer service and convenience benefits.

For instance, it's now possible or even easier to:

• Scan-to-find members from their phone at the box office or any point of sale
• Monetize sponsor visibility or cross-sell from walleted items
• Show symbols or insignias confirming reciprocity access--for instance, add the official NARM badge to certain memberships so your members have reciprocal access to participating museums without them carrying a physical card around
• Cut costs on certain expensive printed/produced credentials

To take advantage of this feature, you need to have enrolled in our mobile wallet add-on. Chat with us through the Back Office if you're interested in turning this capability on.

Technical stuff alert--this is for system integrators.

To help improve data quality of merchandise and concessions in integrated third party systems, on every order that includes merch or concessions items, those individually sold items will include a [TransactionHash] property. That's easier and more reliable than relying on line item IDs or a compound ID.

You'll see this extra, helpful field in any call that returns customer purchases, like /Customer or /Order/Anonymous

For Salesforce and other CRM integrations, this solves any issues showing some dupe merch or concessions sales for repeat customers.

This update relates to advanced, technical users; integrations to Elevent via the Elevent API.

We've made 2 helpful changes to the Elevent API used when integrating other systems to Elevent.

Reserved Seating Tickets are Grouped Together

Before, each individual reserved seat--its row and section--were broken out into individual items purchased in the responses from the Elevent API. This provided fine-tuned detail, but it meant the way ticket sales data on a customer was returned for reserved seats was structured differently from general admission shows.

For instance, before this change, when calling Get Customer by ID

api.goelevent.com/Customer

You'd get something like this, where each reserved seat ticket in an order stood alone.

"Tickets": [ { "TicketId": "vGaFF6JLfu", "TicketName": "Reserved Seat - Adult", "Row": "Z", "Seat": "107", ... }, { "TicketId": "vGaFF6JLfu", "TicketName": "Reserved Seat - Adult", "Row": "Z", "Seat": "104", ... },

Now, in a single chunk, all tickets of the same type in an order with reserved seats will display like this:

"Tickets": [ { "TicketId": "vGaFF6JLfu", "TicketName": "Reserved Seat - Adult", "Row": "Z", "Seat": "Z107,Z104,Z111,Z106,Z105,Z109,Z108,Z110,Z102,Z101,Z103", ... },

Making it consistent with general admission tickets makes it easier to integrate and accurately show ticket sales numbers for organizers who sell both general admission and reserved seating tickets. If you saw odd numbers in Salesforce while using the Elevent for Salesforce app, this change resolves that issue.

You might notice the row reappears with each seat. That's by design--since it's possible to sell tickets across multiple rows, this clarifies exactly where each seat truly is.

LastModifiedDateTime Now Reflects a More Useful Time Stamp

The LastModifiedDateTime on API responses is a useful timestamp for integrations to identify the most recent time period from previous requests--so changes could only be applied since the last request.

Before this change, the LastModifiedDateTime would show the most recent date and time the customer made any purchase or had customer activity--like updating their account, a refund, etc. In most cases, this is perfect.

However, there are times when we might force an update to a customer to trigger an update in a third-party system, like a CRM. The LastUpdatedDateTime stamps will now update when that activity occurs. In this way, any integrated systems will see they should examine and update any returned data since it might be newer.

Looking for API documentation? Check it out here.

We've made some major improvements to the API's data refreshing speed--new info is now made available in the API about twice as quickly.

We'll continue to optimize this new pattern to make this API data fresher and fresher for integrated systems.

Also, we added a new field when getting Membership products: [TaxDeductibleAmount].

This field returns the dollar amount of a membership considered tax-deductible. It's useful to get an Elevent-controlled value in CRMs and email systems to have that value available for tax receipts and supporter communication.

We've added some additional utility to Saved Orders--most notably, you can now associate saved orders with a specific customer.

If you haven't explored them yet, Saved Orders are pending orders where whatever the customer wants is reserved for them until they are ready to pay. It's a great solution for group/VIP reservations or open tabs at the bar.

Saved orders can contain anything--tickets or seats, merch, concessions, passes & packages, gifts, even memberships and donations someone intends to buy or make.

Before now, you could leave notes and see who the order was for. It wouldn't fully assign a saved order to customers already in your data.

Associating Saved Orders with a Customer

Now, you can search for or register a new customer in the Box Office as you normally do; any saved order created or updated with that customer pulled up will be associated to that customer.

When you search for and investigate any saved order, you'll see which customer it's assigned to.

Additionally, when you look up a customer in the Back Office, you'll see any saved orders they currently have.

Saved Orders Returned in the Elevent API

For integrated systems (CRMs especially), you can get information about any saved orders associated to a customer. There's a lot of potential value: You could auto-remind customers about their saved but expiring order or where and how to make that payment so they don't lose their reservation.

Get to know saved orders here.

• New endpoint added to the Elevent API to get all tickets: (api.goelevent.com/Ticket/All). Useful if you want to ingest all of the types of tickets you use and have used in the past into other systems (Is used by the Elevent Salesforce app).
• A column showing payment type has been added to the GL Code Transaction Export
• Added an icon for companion seats in reserved seating - seats for those who accompany someone in a mobility device.
• Performance improvements on pass and package widgets and box office merch
• Completed the swap over to elevent.app for our CDN
• Increased the length of time for the cash drawer change window to 30 seconds
• Added an 'items remaining' column to the Merchandise Sales Detail report--so you can track how many of each merch variant you should have on-hand.
• Officially retired some outdated features, including ticket package fulfillment mode, the advanced showtime scheduler, shared-screen mode for seat selection in the Box Office, and legacy merch.

Integrators, take note--some additional data can be gleaned from the Elevent API, including:

• A [LastModified] timestamp to all Showtime calls in the External Web API--now you can easily limit updates to events and shows only when something has changed since your last run.
• [DeliveryMethod] has been added to all item nodes in Get Customers calls. Now you can see how items were marked for delivery to the buyer and act on that information.
• [CustomHtml] is now returned to External Web API calls. Custom HTML is basically rich, additional content about events. It may contain html-marked-up content, even HTML markup for images and videos. It's tricker data to handle and might cause some security concerns as you ingest it. Adding this data makes it possible to consume full, rich detail about each event for display on websites and apps--without requiring users to make changes in multiple systems.

Also, in the API, we now return $0.00 instead of the original value for the price of refunded passes, packages, extras, and memberships. This brings the behavior more in line with how refunded tickets report.

This one's for the gearheads.

For other systems that talk to our API, you can now retrieve everything you'd want to know about concessions and merch. What the products are and who bought what when.

You can supplement your CRM data with who bought what tangible goods alongside their everything-elseness (Like we'll be doing in our Salesforce app). Or you can create a digital product screen behind your points of sale and turn your popcorn counter into a Wendy's. The fries' the limit.

Expand your knowledge how to retrieve concessions and merch from the API here.

The Elevent API has been redone, really. The driving force behind this update is to give us more leeway to provide a greater amount of data and detail without impacting what's most important--the speed and efficiency of transactions.

The first thing to know is that your existing integrations are safe. The API is backward compatible--all pre-existing endpoints and responses still function and the URL and addresses are the same. Phew. So there's nothing you have to do.

But there is more you can do, if you are so inclined--including:

• Retrieve custom order field data--custom info you gather from buyers
• Retrieve venues and venue information
• Retrieve row & seat on tickets if you are doing Reserved Seating
• Retrieve the VenueID on Get Showtimes results
• Retrieve customer status on Get Customers results--to see if customers are active or otherwise
• See price and description on all Get Products results
• Get a deeplink to the customer details page in Get Customers results
• Added some bits to donation orders to indicate if they are round-up or automated donations
• Return General Ledger codes on Get Products calls
• Retrieve price and description on Get Products calls
• Added which brand(s) are associated with all the tickets in Get Showtimes calls
• Added ShowtimeStartDateTime, ShowtimeEndDateTime, and ActivationDateTime ISO 8601 DateTime properties to Get Showtimes calls from the External Web API

Revisit the tech specs of the Elevent API here.

We've struck a partnership and integration with NBC Universal and Fandango--to make it easy to show off your film screenings and sell tickets through Fandango, movietickets.com, Flixster, and other Fandango properties.

It's a great way to generate more ticket sales and grow your audience on other popular cinema destinations. This applies only to cinema screenings and only in the United States, I'm afraid.

It's fairly straightforward, in the end. You just:

1. Sign up. Fill out this acknowledgement and this sign-up form.
2. Create one or more Fandango tickets

1. Add Fandango tickets to showtimes and put them on sale.

We're giving it away for free for the first year, then we'll discount it to just $25/month per location after that (for a limited time).

You can learn all about selling through Fandango here.