What's new in Elevent

We've always offered the option to print pass and package credentials (i.e. badges) as either seamlessly printed badges or labels you could affix to a pre-printed badge. Both contain a scannable barcode.

The label option previously used Code 128 formatted barcodes; those look a little something like this.

We have since updated those labels to print QR codes you're familiar with.

QR Codes scan more quickly and easily from camera-based scanners, like our popular iOS Elevent At The Door app, so we made this the default. There is nothing you need to do to take advantage of this change.

You may have spied a new setting on tickets--ticket types.

There are only two options right now, but this is a feature we'll continue to expand upon over time.

We needed an easier way to allow you to designate certain tickets, like rush or standby tickets, as available only under certain conditions--ways that were independent from allocations, member exclusivity, ticket packages, or sales channels.

Ticket types really open up the doors to have a kind of ticket that's a whole lot simpler--one that doesn't care about inventory control or allocations. Tickets you can just make available with a simple setup and minimal restrictions.

Of the two types available today, an admissions ticket is a regular, fully-featured ticket you've been selling on Elevent all along. The new Box Office ticket is a ticket that's globally only available for sale via the Box Office.

If you are currently using multiple sections, private allocations, or memberships as workarounds to curate how tickets display or restrict to the box office, try out Box Office ticket types instead.

In the future, we'll expand the ticket types available to introduce some more 'reservation' or low-commitment ticketing options.

In what amounts to just about the last pre-existing feature that needed to be recreated in the new Box Office, sales agents can now easily use customer's gift card to pay for part or all of their purchase.

When agents get to checkout with a known customer in the box office, the agent will see straight away if the customer has a gift card, how much is left on it, and be prompted to apply some or all of the gift card balance to the sale.

We've updated to the new version of Google Sign-in, where customers can choose to log in with Google instead of creating an Elevent account.

The google sign-in button will look different, and the new version does a better job informing returning customers that it both recognizes them and that they've used Google sign-in to log into Elevent (or your website, if using embedded widgets) in the past.

Rules are one of the areas where it's easy to all mixed up--especially when you use more than one at the same time. They're also one of the tools most easy to miss in the Back Office. Rules can be super powerful, especially in combination with memberships, ticket packages, and private allocations.

We've been doing a lot of work on how rules function and making them easier to manage. Ticket rules, in particular.

On the details page for each showtime, for instance, you'll now see which rule is truly limiting each customer to a max quantity of tickets.

For example, if you have a special, limited ticket, you can set the default ticket max per customer on that ticket to 10 per showtime.

On specific showtimes, you can lower the max number of tickets users can get. Visit any showtime and go to the bottom of the page, where you see when tickets go on and off sale. Change the ticket view to rules.

Here you can clearly see what the default rule is and lower it just for this showtime. The blue highlight will show you which rule is the winner--whichever is the most restrictive.

Also, don't miss the bulk rules tools in the Tools menu.

The power user's guide to ticket rules can be found here.

Advanced topic warning

Since the dawn of Elevent time, both the acquisition of a ticket package and grabbing tickets with it were nested under the same 6 or 7-digit order code. In other words, even though a customer would get a whole ticket package in one transaction and then use that package to get actual tickets in one or more separate transactions, you'd see it all in the Back Office and Box Office in one order.

Like this:

There are definitely some advantages to doing it this way--this made it quite easy to see which ticket package was used to get which tickets.

But there are trade-offs:

• It's less intuitive in some ways, when it really is two different transactions performed by the user and/or your staff
• It makes integrating the data into external systems more complicated.
• Perhaps most importantly, it limits our options as to how we can craft how users use ticket packages online

After careful consideration, we've decided to change the way ticket package orders are recorded. Now, using a ticket package to get tickets will create new, standalone orders and order codes with each "fulfillment" transaction. Like this:

One user's order history

You won't really notice any new features or UI…yet. But this paves the way for us to explore ways to allow ticket package holders to also buy non-package tickets at the same time or use multiple packages concurrently.

Elevent supports guest checkout, both online and through the box office. However, when system integrators request from the API all recent activity under customers, these anonymously-purchases items aren't included in the response.

We've added a Get All Anonymous Orders call to the API to round out the full picture of tickts and donations sold, to known customers and no one in particular.

This anonymous data is already retrieved by the Elevent for Salesforce app, to help complete your progress reporting against your campaigns and goals.

Small improvement to the Get Showtimes calls from the Elevent API (For instance https://api.goelevent.com/Showtime/All. Showtimes will now list in chronological order in the response.

The Ticket On/Off Scheduler used to stop showing Virtual Events after their Start Dates. That was problematic since virtual showtimes were still actively streamable until their End Dates--so you couldn't make bulk ticket updates on those showtimes after streaming onset.

That's been resolved; virtual showtimes will stick around until their end dates.

Elevent for Salesforce v1.1 is available. This version includes:

 

Improvement

  

Automatic tracking of field history on Elevent custom objects

The app will now automatically set up field tracking on Elevent custom objects. This makes the sync more transparent. Elevent objects can be viewed on a record’s History-related list or through History reports. For each field, field tracking logs the date and time of change, the user making the change, the old and new values, and introduces the ability to undo a change.

You'll be able to review the update history in the Related tab on each Elevent Update

 

Improvement

  

Elevent for Salesforce will no longer require bleeding-edge versions of NPSP to install

The app will now install and upgrade with less-recent versions of the Non-Profit Success Pack (NPSP) extensions. This became a burden as the NPSP install link has more recently trailed the latest release of NPSP by a number of weeks, causing confusion.

Current NPSP version dependency is NPSP v3.223

 

Fix

  

Adjusted the automatic setting of Last Imported data on On-Demand Imports to reach back 1 day further

Frequent users of On Demand importing data could get confused if no data was being imported when there had been some recent updates. Manually setting Last Imported Data wasn't so intuitive, so this fix will agree better with the API and get all data.

Note, this might result in more duplicate entries of the in-process records in Elevent Customer Updates, but do not be alarmed--the actual, useable processed accounts, contacts, and opportunities will not be duplicated.

 

Fix

  

Avoiding conflict during concurrent scheduled and on-demand processing

It's possible to get this error message: unable to obtain exclusive access to this record” error.This is a Salesforce conflict that could get caused when a scheduled process and an on-demand process try to run at the same time. This fix avoids the conflict, which is really a false alarm.