The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) stipulates that a registered charity cannot return a donor’s gift. As a donation transfers ownership of the money from the donor to the charity, once the transfer is made, the charity is obliged to use the gift in carrying out its charitable purposes. If you are in Canada, this applies to you.

To help keep you out of trouble, we have disabled donation refundability for our Canadian clients. Hopefully, your cold-footed donors will accept the CRA's no-takebacks policy. You may link to the CRA website to help support your customer service response.

Sometimes it's just too handy to be able to print a stack of vouchers. You might have a sponsor who demands something to hold on to or want to drop off a sleeve to a radio station as a giveaway.

When we transitioned ticket printing at the box office to speedier, more reliable local printing we hadn't transitioned the printing of vouchers (e.g. Extras). Now voucher printing takes advantage of your locally-connected printers.

In the Box Office, this means you can pull up any old customer with some unused vouchers.

And push the Print button.

Vouchers will print on your ticket printer.

You can also print vouchers from the Extra Customer Search Tool.

Note: Extras and vouchers are available on the Premiere and Enterprise plans only.

Learn more about printing vouchers here.

Or get to know the Extra Customer Search Tool here.

We have this great Customer Details page where you can really piece together all that a Customer is and does. Search someone up in the Back Office and there is nearly everything Elevent could know about them--what they bought, what they experienced, how much they've contributed, and what info they've shared.

Sometimes you might want to quickly add a single customer to an allocation while you look at them. Perhaps their activity qualifies them for some special VIP benefits or there was a customer service issue and you want to give them access to restricted seats.

Now you can quickly add that customer to an allocation or two without going to the Allocations pages in the main menu. In the Customer Snapshot on the top right, press the Add link next to Private Allocations.

Choose the private allocation to add them to and, at next login or visit, they'll have access to everything that private allocation.

Ushers and gatekeepers are under a lot of pressure to let everyone in--even those who shouldn't be admitted. We're always looking for ways to help them confidently and effectively greet your audience on the day of the show--because it matters big time.

But, yes, sometimes they need the nerve to turn people away. To help them enforce the rules, we've added clarity when rejecting a ticket at the door, letting ushers know exactly when any tickets have been previously scanned. This works on every device on both of our gatekeeping apps, Entry and Elevent at the Door (on iOS).

There's nothing you need to do to enable it--it's happening already.

Learn more about scanning and entry here.

Printing badges, labels, and wristbands--let's face it--it's a huge pain in the ribs. It's costly, time-consuming, and not exactly Earth-friendly. It's not-so-good to have a schedule of fantastic events on a boiling, lava-engorged flameball where no human life can exist. But I digress.

Digital credentials are the future--at least a part of the future. But it's early days yet--tangible items still have major souvenir and peer-marketing value, so they aren't going away entirely. Probably ever. Plus, a large proportion of your audience isn't ready to have their pass or ticket package on their smartphone.

2024 is the year of easy-peasy end-user delivery in Elevent. This is the first of several new features aligned with the idea of paper/plasticlessness. It's incredibly easy to enable; less easy to educate your audience that this is possible and a darn good idea.

For any passes or ticket package credentials you make available online, users see this when they log into their account (embedded on your website or on goelevent.com):

They press the View button and, voilà, there it is.

Learn how to enable/disable digital credentials here.

Link to a help article for end-users here.

As I said earlier, this is just one new method to get credentials in people's hands. If you click on the link above, you'll get a sneak preview into what exciting new method is on the horizon.

A Year of Major Progress: Maximizing, Streamlining, and Interconnecting All of the Things

A year where we embrace the new normal (and sprinkled in some extraordinary)

2023 was the most "normal" year our clients have had in a while--with an underlying desperation about how much of normal we could really recapture. So we embraced that alongside you--and rolled out a suite of improvements and new features that built on top of the basics of ticketing and membership.

We focused on ways to help you scale up - from diversifying your programming through multi-branded accounts, creating tools to make it easier to revolve from one season or festival into the next, and maximize your sales and contributions.

We also re-imagined the future of how other systems integrate with Elevent, introducing a handful more integrations with more to come. And we reworked credentials, badges and printed items with an eye towards a paperless future. And we advanced the art of our state of the art white-label web integration and WordPress plugin to make your online web sales experience even more distinctive--again, with an eye towards our roadmap for next year.

New and Improved Last Year:

Donations

• Introduced recurring donations - automatic monthly, annual, or even weekly or daily donation plans that Elevent collects for you automatically. Works in embedded widgets and on goelevent.com
• Added Your Donations to a user's account page so they can manage their recurring donations
• Customer donation reporting, detail screens, Box Office, and API responses specify whether donations are recurring, one-time, or round-ups.
• New emails will be sent to recurring donors to remind and confirm their donations
• To remain compliant, Canadian clients can no longer refund donations

Credentials and Badges

• Introduced a complete rewrite of credentials and badges--those often printed and worn items that attendees use to enter multiple events. They are more easily customized, flexible, and work with bulk printing and management tools.
• Customers with credentials from passes or ticket packages they purchased can now bring them up on their mobile device from their account details page and scan/punch in from their smartphone. This ability can be turned off in Account Settings
• Re-introduced the ability to print/reprint credentials from a single customer's Customer Details page
• Credentials section added to the Customer detail page in the Box Office

Box Office

• Introduced the new Quick Sale Homepage - a configurable home page where you can put upcoming event tickets and most commonly sold items on one default touchscreen page for quicker walk-up servicing.
• Introduced on-screen tipping during checkout to help staff earn more take home funds
• Added the ability to have tickets and receipts auto-print without a single button push

Brands

• Introduced Brands, the ability to multi-brand different items and group events into different brands. Brands give each collection of items a different look and feel, can be used to filter tools and reports for easier management, can transform what's available for sale at each point-of-sale, and can be used to automatically display different items on different areas of your own website

End of Season and Archiving

• Re-conceived the concept of "End of Season" into a new set of archiving tools, making it easier and more flexible to end your season or year while keeping all of your pre-existing items in play.

Integrations

• Introduced automatically nightly and weekly reporting of movie grosses to Comscore and SWIFT, greatly reducing the inconvenience of manually reporting nightly sales. The tool also helps you comply with Comscore requirements and can provide history and files in case of an audit.
• Introduced Fandango, Movietickets.com, Flixster, and Rotten Tomatoes Integration - increase sales and awareness by selling Elevent ticket inventory through a variety of third-party film destinations
• Introduced TMDB integration to make film event creation and asset gathering a breeze
• Released an integration to the Webedia (Box Office Company) to amplify your marketing and event listings across their network of partners and search engine optimizations
• Upgraded our Airtable integration to support their new API access tokens

Elevent for WordPress Plugin

• Introduced auto-sync--removing the need to push a button to update event information on the website
• Introduced the List Of Shows view - a date-grouped, simplified vertical list of shows, color-coded by any category you choose.
• Introduced the first set of Gutenberg and Elementor blocks, making it a simple, drag & drop process to put Elevent widgets and plugin components on pages throughout your website. They are also more customizable than their shortcode predecessors.
• Added a filter on event calendar pages to only show shows from a specific season, festival, or series
• Added the ability to explicitly specify a different time zone for your website's event schedule
• Added an improved SEO schema to events so you automatically have well-formatted metadata for search engines for events presented by the plugin
• Added the ability for users to land on an event calendar on a view you choose - month/day/week/list of shows
• Added a filter to determine if in-person, virtual/on-demand, and/or live stream shows show on each event calendar on your website
• Did a large pass to improve and optimize CSS styling for easier design and customization
• Added the ability to check a box to use default WordPress templates vs. page-builder (e.g. Elementor) templates for event landing pages
• Removed the dependency on the CPT UI third-party plugin
• Added ability to sort an event grid in pseudo-chronological order
• Added support for multi-part events where a parent event has only a single sub-event
• Added the ability to treat multiple auditoriums or venues in the same physical location as a single location
• Added the ability for dates to automatically flex from individual dates to a date range when a run of shows exceeds 3 days in some locations
• Removed the year from some places where dates display
• Improved the language and clarify of the event calendar legend, where showtimes are color-coded by status
• Added support to paginate and get more than 50 showtimes for a single event
• Added an explicit override to guard against web browser's attempts to adjust for daylight savings
• Mobile-optimizations

API & Webhooks

• Complete rewrite of the Elevent API for greater performance, a higher degree of customizability, and preparation for increased functionality
• Removed the condition where at least one ticket had to be scheduled to go on sale before events would be returned in the External Web API
• Added a host of new API calls, including venues, orders, custom order fields, and more
• Added calls to return concessions and merchandise sales and products
• Added brand detail to API responses
• Added GL account codes to API responses
• Added reserved seating details to API responses
• Added LastModified and ISO 8601 datetimes to most calls

Tickets

• Introduced All-in ticket pricing--a compliance future-proofing, ethical, and organizer-oriented way to display true ticket pricing to prospective purchasers
• Improved the financial reporting on ticket exchanges, more accurately moving funds to the destination showtime of the exchange

Embedded Website Widgets

• Added support for users to upload, resize, and crop photos for credentials and badges right in the widget. This makes it seamless for fill out and customize their credentials during purchase no matter what you require.
• Added support for credential editing to the Account widget--so logged-in users can manage their own credential information on your own site
• Customers with credentials from passes or ticket packages they purchased can now bring them up on their mobile device from the account details widget and scan/punch in from their smartphone. This ability can be turned off in Account Settings
• Added a quicker checkout process to all widget sales, removing a click to dismiss the add-to-cart confirmation
• Added brand detail to the event after transaction complete - for added detail to 3rd-party web analytics systems
• Added a security measure to explicitly whitelist only those websites where you allow your widgets to function

Full Hosted Sites

• Major increases in performance and amount of storage on your hosted sites account
• New WordPress templates are available for different types of programming and organizations
• New plans available for just a few dollars a month to get up to 103% performance increases
• Hourly instead of daily backups available for $5/mo.

Entry and At The Door

• Introduced Scan All Showtimes, to validate tickets, passes, and/or ticket packages for multiple concurrent shows in multiple venues from a single chokepoint
• Entry on larger screens received an entire facelift - it's cleaner, snappier, and looks more like your organization
• Added row and seat info to tickets on Entry and the Elevent At The Door iOS app if the ticket is reserved seating
• Extended the sleep time in the Elevent At The Door iOS app
• Extended the idle time until auto-logout in Entry
• Entry now shows the time and date of the Last Scan when a ticket was already scanned
• You can now download Elevent At The Door from the Entry login screen

Memberships

• Discounts and benefits will now auto-reset themselves at the expiration and commencement of each members term

Extras

• Improved reporting of gift cards so they are handled and report as true payments
• Added the ability to easily print vouchers on your connect devices from our direct print solution

Reporting

• Added new filters and data to the Staff Shift report
• Will display inactive users in the Staff Shift report
• Will return shows with no sales in Reporting Date reports

Other Rando items

• You can now see if you are on the Basic, Premiere, or Enterprise pricing plans in your Account settings
• Added purchase date to reporting on custom order fields--so you know when every user filled out a form
• The Back Office multi-scheduler will now remember your prior allocation template, saving you lots of clicking
• Added the ability to quickly add a customer to one or more private allocations from the Customer Details page
• Added a "Billing Address Required" setting in Account Settings - to require gathering billing address even on online guest checkout sales
• Added midpoint rounding for sales taxes
• More archived ticket data will show up in multiple reports
• Added helpful ticket type icons to the Showtime Details page - making it easier to tell tickets, passes, and ticket packages apart
• Major speed boosts to Box Office, search, and Entry
• Extended the idle time until auto-logout when in the Back Office
• Improved protective measures to ensure each person doesn't exceed a single membership in use for themselves
• The Ticket On/Off Scheduling tool is now limited to the next 2 months of showtimes

2024: Putting it All Together

Next year really started halfway into last year. We've been working on some big, big things.

Our theme for next year is about 'putting it all together'--where we take the large suite of products you can sell and service through Elevent and evolve it into the nexus for your whole org. Integrations and features are great, but we can turbocharge your ops with more pre-built, seamless tools in your Elevent toolbox.

The "all" in putting it all together is going to reach all the way into the customer's first interactions - with even more customizable, modular embedded touchpoints. We will introduce a slick new, 2D and 3D reserved seating system that elevates the assigned seating experience in ways you don't typically see. We're going to re-invent delivery to the customer--where we go paperless, cardless, email-free, and e-Walletable in future-forward ways. And we will make it easy to evolve into a true event organizer CRM platform that opens the door to a myriad of opportunities in our increasingly automated, data, and AI-driven future. The whole shebang.

We know you, as the event organizing machine you are, are competing with more customer experience options than ever. Just getting people out the door is still a challenge. All the data confirms that, with each person that gets back into getting out, once they start they don't stop. We know you aren't just selling tickets, you aren't even just building an audience--you are imprinting valuable experiences into actual, real people lives. AI and machine learning are cool and all, but the value of collective human experience ain't going anywhere.

You make that value. Out of practically nothing. Go you.

We're introducing a small set of usability improvements to help users browse and discover events.

• Venues will now sort in alpha descending order on the Calendar - Day Schedule view.

• Improved the mobile-friendly view of the tricky event list default template.

• Showtimes of the same event in different venues will now display showtime-specific colors on the Event Calendar--if you allow filtering and coloration by venue.
• Added a fix for daylight savings causing the datepicker to show the wrong date on late-night events

We've been making a number of speed and efficiency optimizations over the past 6 weeks, but today we released a huge one that re-imagines the entire performance concept of the box office--especially for those of you who have a large number of future showtimes with tickets on sale.

There's nothing you need to do, but you might need to do a 'hard refresh' of your web browser to get caught up with this new change in the box office (Ctrl-Shift-r in Chrome).

While browsing some larger event schedules, we're seeing as much as a 90% (!) speed improvement. And the more you use it, the faster it gets.

One of the appeals of Elevent's embedded widgets is they can be embedded anywhere--in any kind of website, all without psuedo-embeds or an iframe that jankily embeds one website into another.

That means not only can you natively embed the entire purchase process on your own website, but you can allow others to sell some or all of your items at other sales outlets or locations.

While there are security measures preventing unauthorized parties from selling your stuff for you, with increased demand comes increased exploitation.

We've added an additional security layer to actively prevent embedded widgets from functioning on websites you don't authorize.

On your Account Settings page, you'll see a new Widget Settings section--and in there you'll see the new Domain Whitelist.

Learn more about the wild and wonderful world of global Account Settings here.

For those of you in the movie-showing business, you're likely using our Comscore & Swift auto-submission tool. It's a pretty useful display of data in its own right--a great way to see and predict your box office grosses.

And anything, anything beats staying up late at night to manually send nightly reports to Comscore, right?

We've added some future-looking date ranges to the tool. So you can easily flip forward beyond today, into the weekend or full week ahead.

For instance, if you want a free and clear headspace, you can enter overrides and exclusions on future events on a Friday and go water skiing with a clear conscience all weekend.

Learn more about automated Comscore and SWIFT reporting here.