What's new in Elevent

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.

Before, we would typically set a date with you and run a year-end process with you to make it easy and convenient to set up your 2nd, 3rd, and Xth year season, festival, or series. While you could run this "Close Festival" process yourself, rather than explain it to people, it's just something we would do.

There are some significant benefits to having a kind of reset button, especially if your events have a complex setup. It is, more or less, a magic button that allows you to tweak some pricing and language, schedule new events, and be on your way for the next year. No one remembers every little rule or association they set a year ago. I can't even remember what I had for lunch.

Archiving the prior event cycle does more than just clean up your workspace--it resets any left over customer history that might affect any rules, restrictions, maximums, or usage that would cause issues in future years.

We gave the entire concept of what it means to end an event cycle and reworked this entire process. Enter the Archive tools.

More self-service than before, you can now archive any of your products, events, and showtimes en masse from the Back Office. Just visit the submenu of any of those things.

You can filter the list down by brand, name, or in the case of events, a date range.

You have some flexibility here--you can discontinue items easily, or just reset them and plan to use them in the future.

Get re-started here.

If you are selling reserved seating tickets where the customer is issued a row and seat assignment, we're making it easier for ushers to guide users to their seats upon arrival.

Now, in the Entry and Elevent At The Door apps, whomever checks the attendees in will see their row & seat assignments on the app. This saves precious seconds and scrying paper tickets in the dark to know where to direct people.

You'll see row & seat assignments both pre-check-in…

And after a successful scan.

It'll display well on both smartphone and larger displays. There's nothing new you need to configure for this to start happening.

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.

The newest version features a wide-sweeping cleanup of CSS styling throughout the plugin, improved SEO, and a fix for multi-part events that have only a single sub-event.

• New Feature (Beta): Enable Autosync. When enabled, will automatically sync up the website with new and updated Elevent Events and Showtimes from Elevent every hour. Please do not enable, yet, on production sites.
• Significant styling improvements to the base styles of the plugin to improve the look & feel of Elevent widgets out of the box
• Made half a dozen enhancements to events for SEO (search engine optimization) and rich search engine results listings for ticketable events.
• Fixed a bug where local, non-Elevent code was allowed to re-adjust for time zones, causing confusion over which day of the week displays and when an event is considered a past event.
• Added a setting to multi-part events to identify which event is the parent event, where tickets are sold. This setting is required when there is a multi-part event that only consists of a single sub-event.

• Truncated the year value on the display of dates when added to event grids and lists
• Truncated the year value on the display of dates on the date tabs of the [elevent-showtime-list] shortcode

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.

We've brought back a feature we briefly lost when we rewrote the new credential system.

In the Back Office, when you pull up a Customer Details page (usually from Customer Search), you can print a single person's badge or label.

If the credential has ever been printed before, when you return to this screen, the button will say Reprint instead.

When you reprint a credential, any barcode or ID from the original print will be canceled--it will no longer work--and a new one will be created for the reprint.

Lastly, to facilitate easier on-demand printing by an agent, we also brought back credential detail in the Box Office--when you pull up a customer.

A green checkmark will let you know if the customer has provided enough info for the credential to print. Pressing the Edit link will take you directly to where you print that credential on that Customer's Details screen in the Back Office.

Note that agents who are able to print credentials would need sufficient permissions to get to the Back Office for badge or label printing.

Learn more about printing credentials 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