What's new in Elevent

Creating films can be tedious work--there are a lot of bits of information and, in the film exhibition world, you have more rotation in your programming than live events.

We've got you covered.

Now you can create films with rich content in a matter of seconds; when you create an event, you can skip the typing and import info from TMDB, and online film database.

Glance to the right side when you create a new event. Just enter the name of a film, and perhaps a release date to limit the matches.

Select your film and your event is all set. You can customize any and all info and the images after the TMDB import.

To learn more, here's the haps.

We've added an automated integration to Comscore. For those of you who need to submit sales and revenue information for film & TV sales, attendance, and viewership, your days just got a whole lot easier.

What is Comscore?

Comscore is an independent, US-based media measurement and analytics company. They are the authority for measurement data on movies, VOD, and digital content. We have no formal relationship with Comscore outside of this integration to make it easier for you to share this anonymized data with Comscore.

What does the integration do?

By being fully integrated:

• Sending daily information to Comscore at the end of the day can be automated; no more daily nighttime tasks for one of your staff.
• The accuracy and audibility of your reported numbers is now easily defendable.

How it works

All you have to do is enable it. Find it under the Tools menu.

Note: This feature is only available to Premiere and Enterprise tiers, and is only turned on for cinemas. If you believe you should have access, open up a chat.

Enable the nightly submission and let it run.

Reviewing before submission

You can review and correct any data before it's sent every night, including:

• Sending fair market value instead of discounted amounts
• Excluding any showtimes that should not be reported (e.g. venue rentals)
• Correcting any numbers that would otherwise be misleading

30-day history will be retained, but you can and should export and file away your submissions long-term.

Foot to the floor with Comscore here.

In the effort to winnow down those times when a customer might ever have a reason to leave your own website, it is not possible for users to edit and complete a credential from the user account widget. This way, your attendees can completely provide all of the info for any printed badges, labels, or cards from your website.

There's nothing you need to do to set it up. As you might expect, a user must log in first--and your website needs to have an embedded account widget on it (usually in the navbar on the top).

Once logged in, they view the Account widget to manage their self-ness.

After pressing the Edit Credentials button, they'll be able to provide any optional or required info, even upload and crop/resize a photo(!).

To learn more about how to implement the sign-in, sign-out, and account widgets, check out the Embedded Widgets technical docs here.

Introducing the Quick Sale page on the Box Office. Now you can create a homepage on the Box Office featuring your most commonly sold whatevers alongside upcoming showtimes.

The objective: fewer button presses and greater efficiency for your agents.

The Quick Sale page can bubble-up those showtimes that are likeliest for walk-up customers alongside a custom button layout for any other types of items or donations you want.

You can have a different Quick Sale page for each sales channel--so if you have some stations that vend different types of items, those home pages can differ. You design your Quick Sales pages in the Sales Channel in the Advanced Tools menu--just choose Quick Sale Display from the submenu.

Use the visual designer (if you use Concessions, you'll be familiar with it). The Upcoming Showtimes widget will take care of itself. Then add buttons for any of your other commonly sold items, positioning them wherever makes sense to you.

Once you have a Quick Sale page, that becomes the first page on the Box Office (when on that sales channel). A home icon is added as the first tab.

Learn more about setting up the Quick Sale page here.

Introducing the ability to enable the plugin to sync new and updated events from Elevent automatically. If you enable auto-sync, you won't need to log into WordPress at all to have events update themselves on your website.

But first: We messed up!

You may notice some error messages when trying to update the Elevent for WordPress plugin from the WordPress plugins screen. We accidentally let a security token expire--we're sorry about that.

Just this once, to update the Elevent for WordPress plugin, please do the following:

1. Delete the prior version of the Elevent plugin
2. Upload and activate version 0.6 from the .zip file here. As always, back up your site before doing so, but this was tested extensively and shouldn't be a problem.

Thanks!

• Auto-sync is ready to use. By Enabling Auto-sync on the Elevent Settings page, events and showtimes will sync up from Elevent hourly without user intervention

• Removed the dependency on the CPT UI 3rd party plugin. After this update, you can deactivate and delete CPT UI unless you are using it for other purposes
• Greatly simplified the installation and plugin updating process--no more importing for elevent events, taxonomies, or fields.
• When a user applies the filter on the calendar view, they will no longer be bumped up to the top of the page.
• Made the default colors for showtime status on the calendar view a little easier to see without negatively affecting visual contrast.
• Stopped a chatty message from writing to the PHP error logs frequently.
• Shortened and renamed the key for the festival/season/series taxonomy. We're starting to migrate that category to align with brands in Elevent proper.

Available only on Premiere and Enterprise accounts.

Significant new feature alert--we have introduced the concept of Brands.

A brand is just what it sounds like--a way to gather together certain products and ticketed events under a unique banner and grouping, all within your same Elevent account. With multi-branding, you can visually distinguish your various seasons, festivals, series, streaming channels, outlets, venue rentals, and more under their own storefront.

Branding consists of:

• Unique email templates
• Box Office Agent brand views
• Search and bulk took filtering
• Report Filtering
• Archiving/Resetting a Brand (coming very super soon)

Exploring Brands

You'll see Brands in the main menu. You can create new ones and add products to a brand--each product can only belong to one.

As you work with your products, you'll be able to filter by brand in many places.

Including the Ticket On/Off Scheduler

And some reports

You can even assign a brand to a sales channel and create brand-specific box office views.

Brands beoome a real building block in Elevent--this is a big first leap, and we'll be looking for opportunities to make brands more and more powerful down the road.

Learn more about Brands here.

The newest version of the WordPress plugin contains some major updates to how events sort and display along with some valuable bug fixes.

Before Updating

Important: The changes made to event dates and sorting by date require some manual intervention.

1. Before updating the plugin, you should go to Elevent Events -> Event Dates. Delete any event dates for today and any dates in the future. Or just delete them all. When you re-sync the Elevent plug-in, all of your Elevent Events will have correct dates automatically re-assigned.
2. Update the ACF custom fields for the Elevent plugin. You can retrieve the latest file here and re-import custom fields using the ACF import tool.

• Introduced the ability to sort an event list or grid in psuedo-chronological order. You now have the option to sort by a new field on Elevent Events: Next Earliest Event Date.
  • To enable chronological sorting, update your sort filter in FacetWP to sort by "next_earliest_event_date"

• Added support for child venues--this enables you to designate multiple auditoriums or rooms as all part of a single venue location and list all showtimes by that parent venue. Enable Merge Child Venues on the plugin settings page.

Visitors will see showtimes for the whole site.

When venues have a parent venue

• Created a better mobile-responsive variation of the Day Schedule calendar view for smartphones
• Switched the description that displays on the [multi_part_event] shortcode to the new description field (instead of post excerpt)
• Fixed a bug related to FacetWP causing regular blog posts to sort differently without using a 3rd party sorting plugin; in so doing, we removed a feature that would omit a leading "A" or "The" in event titles when sorting by event name. We will re-introduce that feature soon.
• Fixed it so you will no longer see a warning on plugin activation -- "unexpected output…"
• Fixed the display so you will no longer see flickering when hovering over a datepicker date selected from the View More option (dates far in the future)
• Fixed a bug causing issues when events had the same date as prior years

Available to Premiere and Enterprise tiers only.

We're introducing customer-facing tipping during walk-up transactions via the Box Office and Concessions app. This is an easy and cost-effective way to supplement your staff take-home.

It is not lost on us that this can be a contentious topic. Think carefully about how you use this feature and your staff and compensation policies.

Enabling tipping is simple--go to Terminal Settings in the Back Office, where you created card-reading terminals in the first place.

You'll be able to set 3 percentage-based suggested tips. Of course users can opt not to tip.

You can also set a "smart threshold" - a cutoff point where the suggested tips will be flat dollar amounts.

You can also configure Tipping to apply only on certain types of products on an order. So if you want tipping to calculate only on the concessions in an order, you can uncheck other types of items.

You can see a pretty bad video of the entire tipping process in action, and learn more about how to set it up, here in the docs.

You now have the ability to offer donors the ability to schedule a recurring donation instead of just donating a single time. This is a great way to help one-time donors become repeat contributors.

As a customer donates, they'll have the option to make it a recurring donation.

In the cart and at checkout, it'll reflect that this donation is set to recur.

Recurring donations can be chosen by donors when donating online, whether it's in a donation widget or on goelevent.com. Box Office agents, however, cannot enroll donors into a recurring donation (Saving a credit card for future use at the Box Office is a gray area).

To get started, visit any donation campaign you have and toggle that donation as "Recurring Donation Eligible".

Choose the scheduling options you want to display and you're all set.

Recurring donors will be visible from the Box Office and Customer Details.

And future donations can be canceled from Customer Details

Learn more about Recurring Donations here.

WordPress Plugin v0.5.4 is out.

There's a new view in town--the simple yet effective List of Shows now displays alongside all of the calendar views.

Grouped by day, the List of Shows displays each showtime in chronological order in the simplest, easiest-to-digest way we could imagine. It can also be filtered by a category of your choice. You don't need to do anything but update to make this option available.

Also new:

• Added an option to the [elevent-calendar-view] shortcode to pre-filter event calendars to include only events in a specific festival/season/series taxonomy
• Added a new setting in Elevent settings to define a Default Timezone independent of the WordPress timezone. The Default Timezone will apply to Elevent Events automatically but can be overridden on specific events.
• Added support to specify a landing view on the new event calendar views to first land the user on month, week, day schedule, or showtime list view. Appending a querystring parameter to the ./calendar-view/ link accomplishes this--e.g., https://yoursite.com/calendar-view/?view=list
• Improved the sorting by title to exclude sorting event titles by a leading "A" or "The"
• Returning shortcodes as strings, not echoed, as a best practice
• Removed the chattiness in console.logs and console.debugs
• Removed some calls to demo functions to clean things up a bit