What's new in Elevent

Elevent sends a variety of emails to your customers beyond order and refund confirmations; everything from pre-show notifications to notifications about an upcoming membership auto-renewal.

Along the way, you might be in search of some verification that those emails were actually sent out. Perhaps a customer inquired about missing a notification or wanted to confirm emails are going to right email address. Or perhaps you are doing some research against a card dispute or claim that a membership didn't auto-renew because of a payment card rejection. Or just testing to verify your configuration is set up as expected.

The Email Log report will help you gain clarity.

More of a running log than a report, all emails from Elevent appear here (With the exception of order and refund confirmations).

You can filter to emails sent within a date range. And filter to a certain type of email like Membership Expiration Notification or Recurring Donation Confirmation.

You can browse your outgoing email activity here](https://backoffice.elevent.app/Reports/Log/Email).

Few moments in an attendee's visit make them feel more welcomed than a warm, personalized greeting. We'll help you welcome your visitors at key moments in their audience experience on the day they attend.

Introducing customer labels in Entry--little indicators that display when customers are checked in to let your entire staff know when a new member, donor, first-timer, or lapsed returning customer have graced your doorstep.

Setup

None. It's already happening. Whether you do anything with these labels is up to you.

To really take advantage of these day-of indicators, we recommend communicating a consistent verbal welcome policy for each of the 4 labels. For instance, when you welcome a new member, you may have a new member gift you want to press into their palm. Make sure your front-line staff know the drill.

Entry labels in action

Keep an eye out for:

• Member: The attendee is an active member
• Donor: The attendee has donated in the past at least once
• First Time Visit: This show is the first show this person has attended
• Returning Visit: This person is attending their first show in over a year

At this stage, welcome labels aren't customizable and only display when scanning in users (not List Mode) on the Entry app. These haven't yet been extended to the Elevent At The Door iOS app.

Learn more about personalized greetings here.

Ever find yourself out and about, needing some quick answers or to make a last-minute change?

That's the life of an event organizer--you can't always be tethered to your desk. That's why we extended Elevent's chat support to your mobile devices.

If you have Back Office access, just log in to Elevent on your smartphone (Apple, Android, it matters not). Visit the Back Office and you'll see the familiar Elevent support chat bubble on your screen.

Chat with your Elevent support squad from anywhere. We'll be happy to make last-minute changes for you while you attend to whatever the latest crisis is at that moment.

This is all part of your current service agreement with Elevent, included at no extra charge.

For your marketing and development folks out there--this one's for you.

We've added a field to all of our Email templates where you can embed tracking cookies from Google, Facebook, etc. and track opens and clicks on Elevent-issues emails.

In the Elevent Back Office, navigate to and then

On each Email Template you see here, you'll see a new field where you can paste one or more snippets of code you get from most any third-party system like Google or Facebook.

Be selective which emails you add tracking pixels to. Please don't track the opens and clicks of every single order confirmation unless you have a very, very good reason. Any marketing content in emails, especially third-party trackers, can negatively impact deliverability.

Note: If you are planning to or just starting to use our new Fan Out audience growth platform, you don't necessarily need to figure out or manage individual email trackers. Talk to your Fan Out team to outline your hopes and dreams.

Learn more about Elevent email templates here.

Refunds--everyone's favorite pastime.

While we're no lovers of printed items, printing tickets and receipts is still a thing customers demand. While emailed refund receipts are generally sufficient, it can reduce your risks and quell customer dissatisfaction when you can hand them a printed refund receipt.

We've introduced printed receipt functionality. If you already have at least one printer set up, adding a refund receipt printer is easy peasy.

In much the same way receipt printers were set up for sales, press the cog wheel and choose a printer for refund receipts.

Learn more about configuring printers here.

One of the things we're most proud of is how little intermediary Elevent is between your sales and receiving funds. When using Rolling Payment Processing, you receive your funds with each and every transaction--and we stay out of the way.

That reduces risks to your organization more than you might realize.

You schedule your own payouts from your own merchant account to your bank account--daily, weekly, or monthly.

Looking back over larger date ranges, you might find you want to reconcile Elevent activity to multiple payouts over time. The new Stripe Reconcilation report allows you to do just that.

What Happened to the Existing Stripe Payout Reconciliation Report?

Not much--reconciling each payout has been renamed to the Stripe Payout Reconciliation report, that's all.

We still recommend reconciling each payout separately--it's more reliable and a better practice.

The New Stripe Reconciliation Report

You'll find it here.

Instead of choosing a single payout, you filter over a date range.

And you'll see the payout included in your date range.

Be mindful of the way the date range matches up with your payout date range -- product and GL sales will obey the date range of Elevent activity, not just what's in the Stripe payouts within that filtered date range.

Learn about this new report here.

Ticket packages already come in 3 'flavors' to help you combine season, series, and festival ticketing in attractive, convenient ways:

• The 'punch card' model
• The 'flexi-pack' model, where advance tickets/reservations are optional alongside unlimited walk-up admission
• The 'stretch-pack' model, where advance tickets/reservations are optional but the total number of tickets/walk-up admissions is limited

With each of those models, package-holders are either encouraged or required to take an extra step--and choose the showtimes (And potentially seats) to guarantee admission.

There are scenarios where you already know where and when package-holders should go.

• You might want to offer guided, pre-built multi-day experiences customers can choose from so they don't get lost, miss out on key events, or extend past their travel dates.
• At a bargain price, you might want to feature curated experiences that lead customers through more challenging, less in-demand content
• You might want to offer pre-built experiences that align with each programmer or tastemaker on your team--a walk-in-my-shoes type of pathway

Can we make it even easier and more enticing to buy these pre-ordained ticketed journeys? Enter Curated Packages.

With Curated Packages, you build the showtime and ticketed journey. The buyer simply selects the number of people they'll journey with and checks out. That's it--tickets are secured, inventory is accurate, and the customer simply needs to show up and go.

Curated Packages is a big new feature with a lot of possibilities. Learn all about curated packages here.

For clients who host their own websites on our Elevent Hosted Sites service, we've introduced a new security layer to help protect against bots--an AntiBot Firewall.

Bots are rampant and they are bad news. They can drive up your traffic, degrade performance, explore your website for brute-force attack vulnerabilities, spam comments, and more. While no security measure is an insta-solve to all attacks, an AntiBot firewall is one more valuable tool to help protect the integrity of your website.

What Do I Have To Do?

Nothing. We've already enabled the AntiBot firewall on your website. In addition to the manual IP list we block when we detect suspicious activities, the AntiBot firewall blocks and tracks another set of hundreds of thousands of suspicious IP addresses from a global network of over 250,000 websites.

What Does it Do?

It blocks harmful bots and suspicious IP addresses. It's a blocklist, essentially--stopping a wide array of suspicious traffic sources from getting in.

The list is constantly monitored and is updated every 12 hours. It does its work 24/7.

Version 1.4 of our Elevent Event Ticketing WordPress plugin makes the website integration far more hands-off.

Brands

Last year, we introduced brands as a way to group your products into different brands--the way customers experience these grouped-up concepts, how they report, and how you manage them in the Back Office.

Now, Brands integrate into your WordPress website. The major benefit? Have different parts of your website display events from different brands in totally different places without touching your website.

For example: You might have a year-round season and a special festival one month. You could consider those 2 different brands in Elevent.

On your website, you can feature your year-round season front and center--including or excluding the festival. You could also have a dedicated page for just the festival, where the only events that display are festival-branded events.

The festival/season/series taxonomy in WordPress remains--that's one you can always use within WordPress to group events together. If you want it to automatically categorize event groupings from what you set up in Elevent, brands is the answer.

Elevent event blocks and shortcodes, any event grid or listing you have, sliders, and carousels can all filter events/showtimes by brand.

You can even specify a brand in an URL to prefilter a general calendar to one brand.

Featured Images Update Automatically

Before, when the WordPress site first synced new events, it would import whatever first featured image was found. If the image changed in Elevent, you'd have to update in WordPress separately.

We did this to prevent multiple copies of images from cluttering up your media library and storage.

Now, if a different event featured image is detected from Elevent, those images will update themselves in WordPress automatically.

Hide Legend Option on Showtime List

The Showtime List block or shortcode is the real ticketing widget on event landing pages. By default, showtime buttons are color-coded to show which are sold out, members-only, etc.

It's now possible to hide that legend entirely if it's not helpful.

Some assorted bugs were also fixed, including:

• The Elementor Calendar block wasn't displaying
• The venue name is now hidden when all showtimes at that venue are filtered out
• Fixed a bug where events were set to pending when they were just put off-sale and re-synced based on UTC time

A Delivery Method is simply how you deliver what you sold to the customer. We do a lot of digital delivery in the ticketing world, so it might not be something you ever thought about.

You can also sell tangible goods--like merchandise and concessions--alongside tickets and everything else. We expanded delivery methods to allow different delivery methods to be chosen for each type of product in the cart.

This is one of those seemingly simple changes that has a ripple effect throughout the system. It affects online sales, walk-up/phone sales, reporting, configuration, and revenue.

Delivery Methods are set up in each sales channel you manage. Most orgs keep it to Web and Box Office, but you can make your own.

Now, you can add/remove products for delivery method you offer.

So if you only want to offer Fedex 2-day shipping for merch and membership welcome packages, no problem.

Furthermore, each product can set its own Delivery Method Fee for each delivery option. If FedEx 2-day shipping is free for membership welcome packages but costs $8 for merch, set that here.

Online (including embedded widgets) and the Box Office point of sale will offer these options in a clear, concise way.

We made the important decision not to offer the user a choice for each and every line item in the cart. It's tedious and super-frictiony to make the user choose a delivery method for each set of tickets or item in the cart. All tickets are delivered one way, all merch another, all memberships another way, etc.

Learn more about setting up Delivery Methods in sales channels here.