What's new in Elevent

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.

Nerd alert: this gets complicated

We have made some significant changes to the way ticket exchanges process, paving the way for us to improve the way revenue on exchanges reports out.

Under the surface, we reinvented what ticket exchanges really do. From 2022 and earlier, we recorded ticket exchanges as a 100% discount on the original ticket, which was then canceled, and then a comp of the new ticket. Now ticket exchanges will show as a refund of the original ticket for $0 dollars and comp of the new ticket.

If you put one concept in your head, let it be this:

• When you run reports broken down by event or showtime, tickets and revenue show on the tickets after the exchange
• When you run reports that show tickets and revenue for your whole organization, tickets and revenue show at the time of the original sale

What you'll see:

Performing Exchanges in the Box Office

No changes

Individual Order History

No changes. You'll still see exchanged tickets as cancelled in the Box Office

And you'll see exchange detail in Back Office Order History

Reporting Date Reports (Aka Distributor Reports)

Event and Showtime reports like these are where you'll notice the real change.

In the event of a ticket exchange, the revenue collected on the original ticket will report on the events and showtimes the customer received after the exchange--not during the original purchase.

This is what we want, right? To show amounts collected in exchange for actual admissions to a certain show, even if the actual amounts were collected at a different time from a different order.

This can cause confusion--on certain reports, we will report the revenue for different events at a different time than it was originally collected. So take note.

Regular Revenue Reports

For any revenue reports that aren't broken down by event or showtime, revenue will report when it was collected--the original sale.

For the Event and Showtime Sales Reports, you will see revenue reported on the events/showtimes on tickets after the exchange was performed--similar to the Reporting Date reports. Since these reports filter by purchase date, note that the revenue will be filtered in/out by the date of the exchange, not the original sale.

Accounting & Reconciliation Reports

Revenue will report as collected during the original sale. During the exchange, a refund and sale will report in the transaction history, but all amounts will be for $0. So you will see a refund and a sale for $0 with a payment type of "None".

You'll see the same in the Transaction Exports.

Because this was such a significant re-envisioning, the change will only affect ticket exchanges going forward; they will not report in this newer way retroactively in 2022 and earlier.

We're asking for your input! Please press here to rank some possible enhancements or add your own requests.

• Fixed a bug inhibiting the saved payment method for auto-renewing memberships from carrying forward to the new, renewed membership
• Fixed a bug related to apostrophes and special characters in names in Excel exports
• Added the link to Extras to the mobile version of the navbar on goelevent.com
• The legacy box office way of refunding has been removed from the system--replaced by new refunds
• Legacy customer wish lists have been removed; to be replaced by something better.

We have 3 pricing plans: Basic, Premiere, and Enterprise. To help make it clear which pricing plan your Elevent account is currently subscribed to, we added a little label on your Account Settings page to indicate.

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

Towards the end of this week, we officially push out Version 4 of Elevent. This marks the end of the Beta status of the new Box Office—and the legacy Box Office will be officially put on a raft, set out into the river, and someone will shoot a fire arrow at it and it’ll burn ceremoniously on a little boat and we’ll all feel sad. If only for a minute.

The last real chunk that needed to be made anew was refunds. The next time you do a refund, it will likely look completely different to you—and much better.

New Refunding is massively faster, less error-prone (and nothing is more error-prone than refunds), and will help with more reliable refund and exchange reporting.

Notably, donations can now be refunded as well.

Be cautious with this newfound power--if you auto-send tax deduction letters with each donation, you'll want to inform donors that they cannot claim the deduction if refunded.

Refunds in the older Box Office were just plain overelaborate. You can still refund only some items within an order and can refund only some of the amounts in an item, but we did remove the ability to refund a partial, custom amount of a sales tax or service charge. That’s just far too detailed and it was so very rarely done.

To keep up with industry standards and the ever-changing nature of ticketing, we are also no longer refunding Elevent fees on refunds. The dollar amounts involved are rarely significant, but what this does is greatly reduce many of the issues with refunds and reporting. Refunding a multi-party payment involved 3 separate operations—and now refunds involve just a single operation. It’s a huge improvement, system-wise and for clear, consistent reporting.

We ran the numbers and there’s nothing to suggest significant financial impact here. We are also forgoing any fee increases again this year, despite escalating inflation. If you still have concerns about this impact, you may consider applying a service charge on the act of refunding and incorporating that into your Refund/No-refund policy. Elevent support service charges on refunds and exchanges already.

Learn about new refunds here. Please visit the revamped Box Office Documentation section.

Before, when you created a new staff user, by default they would be set to expire after a year. This was causing some confusion when users would log in after a year and find they didn't have access to any part of the back or box office.

Now, when creating users, they will be set to never expire. However, for security reasons we strongly suggest considering setting an expiration date for users according to your policy.

Introducing the hotly anticipated new Calendar views into the plugin.

These are slick new options to display your calendar of events in monthly, weekly, and day schedule densities to complement your other views. It's great for runs of shows, off-season light programming, regular weekly programming, festivals--it's hard to come up with a scenario where you won't want them available.

Events are color-coded and filterable in-calendar by a category you choose. The background color will communicate ticket availability according to the legend underneath. And it's super fast.

Users can flip between a whole month of events…

…one week at a time…

…or one day at a time, seeing in time what's playing at each venue--that's the first image there at the top.

It's also, if I do say so myself, the best darn designed calendar you're gonna find out there, on full-sized screens or on mobile.

Also in this release:

• Added icons and mobile responsiveness to the new event view navigation shortcode (e.g., the "pill")
• Fixed a bug that could result in the current day disappearing from the [elevent_dates] shortcode before midnight local time
• Cleaned up some styles, freeing up the ability to customize the look & feel more without running into !important CSS overrides.
• Fixed a bug that allowed the datepicker to bust out of its container when there were a lot of dates

You may have noticed already, but we added a "Website" button to your tile on the homepage of goelevent.com. In case any searchers are looking for your website where all the cool stuff happens, clicking this button will take them there.

The link comes from the Navbar Image link you already have set--the same destination users go to if they click on your logo on goelevent.com.