What's new in Elevent

We've taken our original, abbreviated version of merchandise and totally reinvented it.

With this reimagining of merchandise, you'll find a more robust set of categorization and grouping options, a faster, sleeker storefront sales experience, and expanded inventory control. This rebuild of our merchandise system elevates merchandise into a full, retail-lite product sufficient for a gift shop, floating storefront, or gear table.

Note these 2 things:

• Merchandise is only available if you have opted-into the Concessions & Merch add-on (optional)
• This release, while large, is phase 1 of a 2-phased approach to reinventing merch in Elevent. Phase 2 will involve a full, online webstore for merch using the same Elevent shopping cart.

New Merchandise Structure, Grouping, and Management Tools

Group merch into Types, Groups, Merchandise itself, and one or more variants. You can also use brand and GL Code groupings on merch--down to each variant.

With the new Merchandise Manager, you'll have oversight and the ability to make bulk changes to your merch.

Airtable Importing and Updating

Use a new Airtable template to do a one-time or periodic import of all of your merch data--from a single button click.

It's a powerful solution to add-on custom processes, reports, dashboards, and automation to track yields, unit costs, shipments, and orders.

Unique SKUs and Inventory Control

Down to each variant of any merch item, custom price, discount, manage declining inventory, and identify by the product SKU.

Quick and Easy Selling From the Box Office

Merch can still be sold from the same point-of-sale as tickets and memberships, but now it's faster and easier. Expanded buttons allow for quick and easy add-to-carts.

Or for larger stores, simply scan the QR code or barcode on each item and operate grocery store style.

This revamped merch works with a lot of the Elevent systems you use today, including:

• Price Overrides
• Saved Orders
• Sales channels
• Refunds
• GL codes
• Brands
• Discounts/member discounts
• The archiving process
• Taxes
• Service charges
• Reports
• Salesforce app
• Elevent API
• Email confirmations, Receipt printing…everything associated with the shopping cart
• Guest checkout
• Gift Cards

There's more to come next year, but this is quite a lot to dig into. Learn more here:

• Selling Merch
• Intro to Merch
• Categorizing Merch
• Importing Merch from Airtable

Building on what Saved Orders can do, let's explore reservations.

• You may have a visiting class or group that wants to ensure you have room for all of them on a planned arrival. And they may get a group rate
• You might need to reserve specific seats for specific board members or other VIPs, before you even approach them about payment
• You might want to compose a complex order full of an assortment of things for a specific person or organization and need to save your work in progress for a while

Saved Orders can create reservations for all of those reasons and more. This is something any skilled box office agent can do.

Just starting building a cart of just about anything. Select specific seats from the seat map, based on what's available, add ticket packages, merch, etc.

Extend the expiration date out weeks or months in the future and give it a name.

Later, when it's time to close out the reservation, just copy it back to the cart, modify, and process payment of any kind.

Train your front-line staff how to manage reservations here.

We're excited to introduce Saved Orders - a powerful new feature that enables your staff to build an order and save it for later. It's a flexible option that helps solve 2 common scenarios. This is part 1 of 2, where we'll discuss Saved Orders for open tabs (think bar tabs or checks).

This is all done from the Elevent Box Office. To do it right, you'll need the Concessions and Merchandise Add-on and be a Premiere or Enterprise client.

It's fairly simple for your staff. First, they add items as normal to the cart.

Instead of speeding along to checkout after every request, they push the button to open a tab.

Later, then can add more drinks, food, or slap bracelets to their tab and pay whenever they are ready to close out.

All along, Elevent is creating and assigning a 7-digit order number to the order--that'll be the order number upon completion. The saved order can be copied into the cart, modified, and either saved again or moved to checkout at any time.

Checkout is the same process as with any order--tipping may be involved. Discounts and comps may be applied. Vouchers and Gift Cards could be used. Payment is processed and a receipt is printed.

To learn how to master open tabs, read up here.

We've been beta-testing ticket delivery to mobile wallets and we've seen better-than-expected adoption. You are now invited to opt into this add-on for your organization.

What are Mobile Wallet Tickets?

You have likely been prompted to add an airline or event ticket to the wallet on your smartphone before. Instead of dealing with printed or print-at-home tickets, instead of downloading a new app, it's easy and secure for customers to add tickets to their own digital wallets.

At the push of a few buttons on their smartphone, any of your customers can add their Elevent tickets to their device. Then they just show up and show their tickets for easy scanning/entry.

Customization

We can skin these items to match the colors, logos, & banner images from your organization--they can look pretty slick and contain some sponsor/supporter presence. Lookin' good, Sidewalk!

Why is This Better?

A lot of reasons, actually:

• Helps guard against scalping and unauthorized resale
• Easier for the attendee--no printing at home, nothing to remember to bring, no trips to the box office, no need to download anything beforehand or even have internet access.
• No need for the attendee to download more apps to their device; their wallet follows them across all of their devices (of the same make)
• Speeds up entry at the door: Mobile wallets brighten the screen automatically and feature the QR code more prominently. We can even offer much speedier NFC or RFID chip reading for advanced use if you really need to manage a crowd at 1/2 or 1/3 the normal gate time.
• Appeals to younger audiences; this is how they roll
• Better solution than printing for non-ticket items, like membership cards and passes.
• Future-proofing: We fully expect this to become the norm
• Better suited to receiving items by text/SMS
• Cuts costs and is more environmentally friendly than any tangible items

Kind of a no-brainer.

Refunds, Exchanges, Gifts, Add-ons, Past Showtimes, Reserved Seats, In-Person, and Everything Else

It's all supported. Mobile wallet tickets work across all of the Elevent ticketing system.

Will They Work at our Venues?

Yes, they'll scan in like normal items using Entry or the Elevent At The Door iOS app. List mode works as well.

To learn more, check out this section of the Elevent knowledgebase.

Mobile Wallet tickets is an optional add-on feature. Existing Elevent accounts are eligible for a 50% lifetime discount, so let us know if you want to check it out.

This is phase 1 of mobile wallet support. Not too far down the road, keep an eye out for support for other items, including memberships, passes, and ticket packages and text/sms delivery options.

Donors often want to make their donations anonymously or on behalf of someone other than themselves.

Heretofore, if you wanted to prompt donors, you'd create a couple custom order fields on that donation ask. The setup is cumbersome, the data a bit nonstandard, and it didn't work seamlessly with CRMs and other 3rd party integrations.

These are common fields that go along with donations, so we added them as standard options. Now they are easier to set up and feed more seamlessly into the post-donation tasks you have, like how to list people where you thank people and any scheduled and automatic processes you have later on.

Plus, we can make it more seamless for the donor.

Enabling this is very easy - just go to your donation campaign in the Elevent Back office. You'll see 2 new options - one to allow anonymous donations, the other to enable tributes/acknowledgements.

Flip those to Yes and you're in business.

These options show everywhere: Online in both widgets and on goelevent.com; also in the Box office.

You'll see the data collected in both Order Details and Customer Details, and in reports like the Donation Customers report. This data also gets spit it in the Elevent API for integrations

Note: At time of launch, the Elevent for Salesforce app is not yet picking up these inputs. This is coming very soon--in the next update in the next several weeks. You may want to continue with Custom Order Fields until we add support for that in the Salesforce app.

Learn more about Recognizing and Acknowledging Donors here.

A couple of years ago, we released our brand spanking new Box Office. This new and improved version kept almost every bit of functionality as the old one, had a new, better UI and added some new capabilities. I think it's fair to say it's been a success

There was one rather popular thing the old Box Office could do that the new one couldn't--until now. You couldn't lower the price of one item just this one time. You'd have to create a proper discount or a differently-priced item.

We always intended to restore this ability at some point, with a bit more security around it. We expected to really rethink and redo how to process these, and in the end, are doing these in quite similar fashion as they used to work--showing them as discounts.

The button to apply a Price Override isn't too obvious (This is by design). You'll see it hiding out towards the bottom of the shopping cart readout.

To the box office manager, they are just lowering the price of some items for a specific customer. To track them across all of your reports, however, you'll see the price difference reflected as a custom discount.

This should reduce the number of items and discounts you have to create a bit and clean up your screens somewhat.

To learn more about applying a price override, get in the know here.

Members are hard to get and they are amongst your most valuable constituents--so every which way you can retain them is essential.

To make it easier for members to stay members, we've introduced grace periods for memberships. An optional setting, you can now set a grace period for the number of days after a membership expires when a member still has the option to renew--and not have to re-enroll as a new member.

To add a grace period to any membership tier, visit that membership in the Back Office. Then drill down into the View Renewal options for that membership.

Determine the number of days after a membership expires when the member can still renew.

Save that and you're done.

After this change, recently expired members (within the grace period) will no longer see the option to buy a new membership; they'll see they still have the option to renew.

At the box office, the behavior is much the same--sales agents can pull up a recently expired member and will be prompted to renew instead of selling a new membership.

Note that members in the grace period can only renew their prior membership; they can no longer upgrade, at least not before renewing.

Learn more about making memberships renewable here.

Introducing Universal Vouchers--one of the most advanced and flexible ways to offer tickets and other items ever. This is a big additional and practically qualifies as a whole new product offering.

The impetus for Universal Vouchers is two-fold:

• The need to offer a voucher that could be used to get more than one type of thing. Such as a voucher that doesn't care if it's a regular or matinee ticket, or an in-person or virtual show, or a day pass on any day.
• The need to quickly kick out Quantity X of emergency, rain-check vouchers. Those back-pocket, make-good vouchers you might need for a variety of customer service issues. Maybe you have to turn away some people from a sold-out show or as an alternative to a refund for a canceled show.

That's a lot of impetus.

We made Universal Vouchers a 3rd type of Extra. Which means they can do a lot. It also means they are far from the simplest thing to wrap your head around.

The high points:

• They can't be sold or part of an order--at least not directly. So they don't have prices, taxes, service charges, discounts, or any of that.
• Each one is just quantity 1 - they are single vouchers
• They can (and often will be) added to a Voucher Bundle. That's how they can be sold or issued to people in an order online or at the box office.
• If they aren't in a Voucher Bundle, they can just hang out as loose vouchers you give to people or be assigned to--and restricted to--one user who can use it.
• They can be used to get a lot of things, including tickets, passes, ticket packages, memberships, and concessions

The flexibility of these vouchers is really the high point. No matter what enormous, crazy, bespoke schedule of events you have, here is this one voucher you can issue that a customer can use for just about anything. When you create one, you go shopping around all of your products to determine what the voucher is eligible for.

The customer either has a voucher code or owns some vouchers--and uses them online or when they walk up to any Box Office station. They'll even volunteer to get used up in embedded widgets--the kind of thing you'd only think possible in old-style, janky iframe embeds.

We're going to be listening to you to learn the ways you take advantage of Universal Vouchers and how they can be made easier and better. Come join us on our next webinar for a deeper dive.

Until then, get to know how to Create Universal Vouchers, Issue them, and Manage Them

We've given the Entry app a significant power-up; now you can see each individual who has been checked in. And if someone was admitted by mistake, undo that check-in. This is one of the longest-running, most asked for features. Because we've all been there--regret, shame, wanting a takeback for that accidental button push.

You'll see a new checkbox in Entry when you in expanded mode (tablets, laptops, some screen bigger than a smartphone). You'll also need to be in List Mode, where you can see more than just a scanning box.

When you check the Show Redeemed checkbox, you can see every ticket, pass, and ticket package holder who has already been admitted.

Tickets, whether they are individual tickets or part of a package, can be unchecked-in by pressing the button.

Undo puts that entrance back into the scan counts, updates the data system-wide, and restores that ticket to a usable state.

Note that pass scans will show up in the list, but they can't be undone. It's problematic since one pass might be eligible to be scanned in multiple times.

Learn more about Managing Entry Without Scanners or Cameras here.

Vouchers are a great and powerful tool in Elevent--awesome for highly flexible ways to give customers the right to use or share items-to-be. But with that flexibility can come challenges making it easy for customers to understand and use them.

On goelevent.com, where we have more control, we've always been able to do an effective job recognizing logged-in users, seeing if they have remaining vouchers, and prompting them at checkout to use them by pressing a button or two. This has been a very successful and sleek customer process.

That's pretty cool what's happening there. Elevent detects:

• If someone is logged in
• If they have any unused vouchers
• What's in their cart
• If any of their unused vouchers could be used right now based on what's in their cart

Then it personalizes the experience to let them mash a couple of buttons to turn those paid tickets into voucher usages. Usings. Voucher redemptions. Whatever.

When the checkout process is embedded into your own website, it's a bit trickier. Elevent has limited control over your website and has less guaranteed real estate to work with.

In the past, we didn't detect if the customer had vouchers they could use--they would need to know their voucher numbers and enter them in like this:

So that wasn't setting the world aflame for frictionless checkout. Now, even in those embedded widgets on your own website, we'll detect the customer (if logged in), assess whether they have vouchers they could use based on what's in their cart, and give them the option to apply them without typing anything in.

So that's a whole lot easier.

We'll retain that text box where users can enter vouchers they have--it's still super useful for those customers who received vouchers from other people. But this should cut into a large chunk of voucher usage and weed out a few customers who got lost along the way.

Learn more about how customers use voucher bundles here.