What's new in Elevent

To extend our redesign of tax-deductible donation receipts, you can further personalize them now with a custom, personalized image. What better way to imbue your thanks with authenticity, professionalism, and strengthen your emotional connection to those who give.

Canadian charities: a signature may be required for a CRA-compliant receipt, so pay special consideration to this option.

To add your personalized image, head to then PDF Settings.

On the bottom of that page, you'll see the Donation Receipt section. Upload or drag in an image to display on any donation receipts your donors receive through Elevent.

Now, all future donation receipts will include this touch of class from you.

Check out how here.

This update relates to advanced, technical users; integrations to Elevent via the Elevent API.

We've made 2 helpful changes to the Elevent API used when integrating other systems to Elevent.

Reserved Seating Tickets are Grouped Together

Before, each individual reserved seat--its row and section--were broken out into individual items purchased in the responses from the Elevent API. This provided fine-tuned detail, but it meant the way ticket sales data on a customer was returned for reserved seats was structured differently from general admission shows.

For instance, before this change, when calling Get Customer by ID

api.goelevent.com/Customer

You'd get something like this, where each reserved seat ticket in an order stood alone.

"Tickets": [ { "TicketId": "vGaFF6JLfu", "TicketName": "Reserved Seat - Adult", "Row": "Z", "Seat": "107", ... }, { "TicketId": "vGaFF6JLfu", "TicketName": "Reserved Seat - Adult", "Row": "Z", "Seat": "104", ... },

Now, in a single chunk, all tickets of the same type in an order with reserved seats will display like this:

"Tickets": [ { "TicketId": "vGaFF6JLfu", "TicketName": "Reserved Seat - Adult", "Row": "Z", "Seat": "Z107,Z104,Z111,Z106,Z105,Z109,Z108,Z110,Z102,Z101,Z103", ... },

Making it consistent with general admission tickets makes it easier to integrate and accurately show ticket sales numbers for organizers who sell both general admission and reserved seating tickets. If you saw odd numbers in Salesforce while using the Elevent for Salesforce app, this change resolves that issue.

You might notice the row reappears with each seat. That's by design--since it's possible to sell tickets across multiple rows, this clarifies exactly where each seat truly is.

LastModifiedDateTime Now Reflects a More Useful Time Stamp

The LastModifiedDateTime on API responses is a useful timestamp for integrations to identify the most recent time period from previous requests--so changes could only be applied since the last request.

Before this change, the LastModifiedDateTime would show the most recent date and time the customer made any purchase or had customer activity--like updating their account, a refund, etc. In most cases, this is perfect.

However, there are times when we might force an update to a customer to trigger an update in a third-party system, like a CRM. The LastUpdatedDateTime stamps will now update when that activity occurs. In this way, any integrated systems will see they should examine and update any returned data since it might be newer.

Looking for API documentation? Check it out here.

As your staff and Elevent user list grows, you might start to pile up inactive users that clutter up your user list--former staff, seasonal staff, etc.

To help you manage your currently active users, we've added an Inactive user filter to the Staff Manager in your Account menu.

By default, we'll land you on this page with inactive users filtered out. To show all deactivated users, just flip this filter to Yes.

Enjoy your unlimited Elevent user abilities here.

Elevent sends a variety of emails to your customers beyond order and refund confirmations; everything from pre-show notifications to notifications about an upcoming membership auto-renewal.

Along the way, you might be in search of some verification that those emails were actually sent out. Perhaps a customer inquired about missing a notification or wanted to confirm emails are going to right email address. Or perhaps you are doing some research against a card dispute or claim that a membership didn't auto-renew because of a payment card rejection. Or just testing to verify your configuration is set up as expected.

The Email Log report will help you gain clarity.

More of a running log than a report, all emails from Elevent appear here (With the exception of order and refund confirmations).

You can filter to emails sent within a date range. And filter to a certain type of email like Membership Expiration Notification or Recurring Donation Confirmation.

You can browse your outgoing email activity here](https://backoffice.elevent.app/Reports/Log/Email).

Few moments in an attendee's visit make them feel more welcomed than a warm, personalized greeting. We'll help you welcome your visitors at key moments in their audience experience on the day they attend.

Introducing customer labels in Entry--little indicators that display when customers are checked in to let your entire staff know when a new member, donor, first-timer, or lapsed returning customer have graced your doorstep.

Setup

None. It's already happening. Whether you do anything with these labels is up to you.

To really take advantage of these day-of indicators, we recommend communicating a consistent verbal welcome policy for each of the 4 labels. For instance, when you welcome a new member, you may have a new member gift you want to press into their palm. Make sure your front-line staff know the drill.

Entry labels in action

Keep an eye out for:

• Member: The attendee is an active member
• Donor: The attendee has donated in the past at least once
• First Time Visit: This show is the first show this person has attended
• Returning Visit: This person is attending their first show in over a year

At this stage, welcome labels aren't customizable and only display when scanning in users (not List Mode) on the Entry app. These haven't yet been extended to the Elevent At The Door iOS app.

Learn more about personalized greetings here.

Ever find yourself out and about, needing some quick answers or to make a last-minute change?

That's the life of an event organizer--you can't always be tethered to your desk. That's why we extended Elevent's chat support to your mobile devices.

If you have Back Office access, just log in to Elevent on your smartphone (Apple, Android, it matters not). Visit the Back Office and you'll see the familiar Elevent support chat bubble on your screen.

Chat with your Elevent support squad from anywhere. We'll be happy to make last-minute changes for you while you attend to whatever the latest crisis is at that moment.

This is all part of your current service agreement with Elevent, included at no extra charge.

People tend to spend a lot of time on the Showtime Details page for on scheduled showtime.

There's a lot going on with any showtime - the tickets available, allocations of inventory, sales, discounts, rules, on and off-sale times, and more. This busy page functions as a kind of dashboard in its own right, for one showtime at a time.

Customer Report

To help you quickly pull a list of customers or sales just for this one showtime, we've added a couple of quick buttons up near the top.

Press the Customer Report button and you'll see a list of all the tickets purchased and by whom. Nudge the purchase date a bit to make sure you get everyone over time.

This kind of customer list is most useful for general admissions tickets; if you are using reserved seating, the Seat Manifest will show you a customer list and all the visuals you need for seating.

Sales Report

Similarly, press the Sales Report button to view all sales just for that showtime--broken down by type of ticket, allocation, section, discounts, and sales channel. Handy info!

Bonus tip!

One of most overlooked features on the Showtime Details page lives towards the bottom of the page. Check it out in the Ticket Details section.

For the ultimate in x-ray vision, did you know you can switch the view of all tickets sold in a showtime to see the discounts or rules that are in effect?

Switch the view to Rules and you'll see which maxes apply across all the ticket rules.

Advanced topic--integration nerds only.

Webhooks are a handy, relatively easy way to trigger other systems you might use to automate or update when activity happens in Elevent. Running a membership welcome campaign or tracking each donation in a table somewhere? Webhooks can fire every time a certain item is purchased or event happens--and other systems can subscribe to these events fees, like Zapier, make.com, n8n, etc.

Are you using or planning to use Elevent's new Fan Out Audience Growth platform? Most of the solutions you have that use webhooks would likely be replaced by Fan Out. Webhooks are more for technical, solo builders.

Redesigned Webhooks for Gifting Scenarios

Head into the expansive Elevent page in the Back Office. Navigate to the Webhook Manager.

Before, it really wasn't doable to separate the events from when a giftable item was purchased vs. when it was claimed by the recipient. Now you can cleanly and clearly track both events.

When a giftable item is purchased as a gift, the new IsGift field will indicate the item was a gift.

A new webhook will fire now when any gift is claimed by the recipient--so any automated welcome routines you want to target these potentially new people can fire right then. And you can put the picture together between gift buyer and gift recipient.

Memberships

When someone buys a membership, we added the Membership code to the data returned.

For your marketing and development folks out there--this one's for you.

We've added a field to all of our Email templates where you can embed tracking cookies from Google, Facebook, etc. and track opens and clicks on Elevent-issues emails.

In the Elevent Back Office, navigate to and then

On each Email Template you see here, you'll see a new field where you can paste one or more snippets of code you get from most any third-party system like Google or Facebook.

Be selective which emails you add tracking pixels to. Please don't track the opens and clicks of every single order confirmation unless you have a very, very good reason. Any marketing content in emails, especially third-party trackers, can negatively impact deliverability.

Note: If you are planning to or just starting to use our new Fan Out audience growth platform, you don't necessarily need to figure out or manage individual email trackers. Talk to your Fan Out team to outline your hopes and dreams.

Learn more about Elevent email templates here.

It's been a treat seeing all the creative uses of custom order fields--those checkbox, dropdowns, and text fields you can present to customers when buying items or completing an order.

We've seen raffle entries, agreeing to terms & conditions, allergy notifications and meal choices, swag requests, and more.

The Custom Order Field report will spit out a live list of every reply. As usage has grown, flitting through this report needed a little love.

We've added some extra filters to help you make this report work for you.

Most notably, you can now filter to only responses made within a range of dates. These go by purchase date--so the date range still works by the time in which the order was made.

You can use these filters along with the others, so you can easily filter to a certain type of item and look at only a range of purchase dates.

Note that if you filter to only show responses for ticket purchases, you'll see additional filters--where you can filter responses for a specific showtime. So, for instance, if you ask patrons who might need listening-assistive devices, you can review responses show by show.

You can even elect to show empty responses--if you have some requirement to show when customers were presented with an option and didn't engage.

Review collecting additional info from customers during orders here.