What's new in Elevent

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.