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March 2020 Release Notes: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/1192806
Welcome to the March release! Check out this video for a quick overview, and read on for more details on what's new.
What's New in This Release
We're delighted to bring you PatronStorm, a brand-new class registration integration with our partner, CourseStorm! Now you can use their robust, dedicated class registration system to manage your classes, and report on attendees and their other interactions with your organization inside PatronManager.
The March 2020 release also contains a number of new features for the public ticketing site:
- An optional cart timer shows your patrons how long they have to complete their order, and you can customize the time limit to release inventory faster
- Category filters help your patrons quickly find events that are relevant to them, and you can also create prefiltered links: one link to your family-friendly shows in a targeted email to parents, another just to dance events for a partner's newsletter, etc.
- Additional guidance in the PTS Theme Builder explains each theme and displays a warning if the brand colors you've selected aren't compatible
Other updates include a brand new CRM Snapshot and improvements to other Snapshots, the option to set the default view for Allocations inside PatronManager, and more.
Finally, we'll give you the highlights from Salesforce's current release to help you make the most of their latest features!
Read on to learn more about:
- PatronStorm class registration integration
- Public ticketing site updates, including
-
CRM Snapshot updates
- Including a brand new subscriber Snapshot!
- Bug fixes and other improvements
- Salesforce Spring '20 updates
Ready? Let's dive in!
Want to be part of the product development process? We conduct regular user research sessions and we'd love to include you. Head over to your Community Profile to add your preferences and tell us how you'd like to participate!
Release Notes Webinar
Class Registration is Here!
Many of you offer classes, camps and workshops, and you've been asking us for a better way to offer online registrations for those educational programs and track the results. We're thrilled to announce a new partnership with CourseStorm, a simple yet sophisticated solution that will streamline the registration process for your education department.
As part of this partnership, we've created an integration that allows you to view and report on CourseStorm data within PatronManager. The PatronStorm integration will give you a holistic view of your patrons' ticket purchases, donations, and class registrations all in one place.
PatronStorm is currently in "beta" and we are looking for clients who are ready to get started with CourseStorm now, to help us determine what reports to include in the final package.
Interested in using CourseStorm? You can learn more about CourseStorm's features on their website, and they'd be delighted to set up a demo to show you how the software works.
Public Ticketing Site Updates
This release includes several new features and updates for the PTS, focused on usability.
Cart timer
The cart timer allows you to release inventory more quickly and lets your patrons know how much time they have left to complete their order. Building a sense of urgency can help you increase sales, and may reduce the number of abandoned carts. You can customize how long tickets are held in a patron's cart, from 5 to 60 minutes.
To enable the cart timer and customize the time limit, head over to PatronTicket Settings via the PatronTicket Hub:
You'll find two new fields in the "Public Site Settings" section:
- Display PTS Cart Timer - check this box to enable the feature and display the timer on the public ticketing site.
- PTS Cart Time Limit - Length of time (in minutes) a patron has to complete their Ticket Order on the PTS. Note: you must check the box to display the timer in order to reduce the time below the 60-minute default.
The cart timer is only available for the new public ticketing site. Haven't yet made the switch? Head over here to get started with the new PTS!
Category filters and prefiltered links
Category filters allow your patrons to quickly find Events that are relevant to their interests (family-friendly shows? Dance performances?), using up to five customizable filters that are specific to your organization.
In addition to the built-in PTS filters, you can create prefiltered links to direct patrons to a particular view of your ticketing site. For example, you might create a link with a built-in filter for family-friendly Events, and include it in an email to parents whose kids had attended one of your classes. Or perhaps you'd like to place two separate links on your website: one link to the calendar view, filtered for daily admission tickets to an exhibition, and a separate link to the Event list, filtered for performances.
Ready to learn more about category filters and start using this new feature? Check out the full instructions here!
Theme Builder guidance
The PTS Theme Builder allows you to customize your branding on the new public ticketing site, but it hasn't always been clear how each theme uses the colors you select. If the brand colors lack sufficient contrast within the selected theme, it can make text and links on the PTS unreadable.
To help you ensure your site meets Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (and is easy for your patrons to use), the Theme Builder now contains a brief explanation of each theme, a preview of your selected colors, and guidance for color compatibility.
If your color selections aren't a good fit for the theme you've chosen (or are too similar to one another), you'll see a warning:
You can then try a different theme or different colors, and the message will update with each change you make!
Ready to learn more? Check out the "Online Accessibility Guidelines" article!
If you're already using the new PTS, we recommend heading over to the Theme Builder via PatronTicket Settings, and clicking "Edit Draft Theme" to check on your current selections.
Other PTS improvements
This release also contains a few more adjustments to the ticketing site.
Calendar defaults to the first performance date
If the next Event you're selling isn't for a month or two, your patrons won't have to keep clicking "Next" on the calendar to find it. Instead, when they land on the PTS calendar page, it will default to the month with the first visible Event Instance.
Q: What makes an Event Instance "visible"? Don't you just mean "on sale?"
A: Not exactly. If you want an Event to appear on the PTS prior to the Sale Start Date, you can set the "Not on sale yet" message on the Ticketable Event.
And don't forget about presales: if you're using the recently-released Passcodes feature, or giving your PatronPortal users automatic early access when they're logged in, an Event Instance will be visible on the calendar as appropriate.
Format telephone numbers as click-to-dial links
Many thanks to a client who let us know this was missing! Now when you format a phone number as a "tel:" link in a rich text field on the PTS, your patrons can click the link to call the number. Rich text fields include things like the Ticketable Event and Event Instance Detail, the Event Content, and more.
For reference, here's an example of how to format a phone number link:
<a href="tel:1234567890">Call the box office at 123-456-7890</a>CRM Snapshot updates
CRM Snapshots help you quickly gather lists of patrons based on criteria you choose, giving you access to great insights with just a few clicks. This release contains a brand-new subscriber Snapshot, plus improvements to several others. Click the titles below to learn more!
One of the most popular Snapshots is designed to "Find patrons who bought tickets to ‘more than’ or ‘at least’ or ‘exactly’ X events in a timeframe", but it's designed for single ticket Events and doesn't play nicely with subscription packages. What if you want to find repeat subscribers, or patrons who have subscribed to both your Winter and Summer series?
This new Snapshot is for you! Head to the CRM Snapshots tab and from there to the "Tickets" sub-tab, and look for the one designed to "Find patrons who have subscribed 'more than' or 'at least' or 'exactly' x times".
Do you recognize donors in program books or on donor walls? Is it challenging to get the right list of donors and their levels? Recent releases have simplified this process with a CRM Snapshot, and this release makes it even better.
Now you can exclude any Donations that were marked as "Anonymous" from your program listing Snapshot with a single click -- and without accidentally excluding any other, non-anonymous gifts from those same donors.
Click here for step-by-step instructions to create program acknowledgment lists!
While in some cases you may wish to include deceased patrons in your queries, in most Snapshots it's better to exclude them to avoid accidentally-awkward outreach attempts.
Now this is easier; all Contact-based Snapshots include a new option built in to "Exclude deceased contacts".
Not sure how to mark a patron as "Deceased", or want to make sure they're excluded from outreach efforts when you do? Check out this article to learn more.
If you've used the Snapshot designed to "Find Patrons who bought tickets to "more than" or "at least" or "exactly" X events in a given time period", you know it's a great way to query for either multi-buyers or single-Event buyers. Previously, though, it didn't tell you *which* Event(s) they had purchased in that timeframe, just the number. Now you can have both!
Bonus: this column also appears in the new subscriber Snapshot, giving you a list of subscription packages.
While this Snapshot now contains the list of Events in a field named "Events", you may need to add that "Events" column to your report. If you're not sure how to do that, head over here!
Bug fixes and other improvements
With each release we make small adjustments to tidy up unexpected behavior and improve your PatronManager experience. Click the titles to expand!
The December 2019 release introduced a new view of Allocations and Price Levels on the Event Instance inside PatronManager, giving you a birds-eye view of Allocation data first, with options to expand those Allocations individually or en masse to see Price Level detail.
While the "Collapsed" view was by far the most popular with clients during testing, in some cases the "Expanded' view is better:
For example, while you're building Events, you may prefer to have easy access to view and create Price Levels without an extra click to expand things, whereas during your season you may prefer to start with the high-level "Collapsed" view.
Now you can change the default whenever you'd like! Head over to PatronTicket Settings and look for the "Use Expanded Allocation View?" option, in the first section of the page:
We fixed an issue affecting a small number of organizations who were using both the Automated Communications feature and a standard Salesforce email signature.
Previously, if the user who enabled Automated Communications had an email signature set up in Salesforce, their organization's pre- and post-show emails included that email signature. We fixed this so that those emails no longer pull in the signature field.
Click here to learn all about Automated Communications for pre- and post-show emails!
A recent bug stopped the system from activating a Portal user if the patron's Membership Order wasn't paid in full. Now (as was true prior to the bug) the patron's Portal account will be activated automatically when the first payment is processed on their Order, whether it's a partial or full payment.
Salesforce Spring '20 Highlights
The Salesforce Spring '20 release bloomed a few weeks ago, in mid-February. Here are some highlights from their extensive release notes. We're especially excited about the reporting features!
1. Lightning updates
Salesforce's Lightning interface keeps getting better and better. This release brings you new capabilities for related lists and (hooray!) a fully-functional Recycle Bin.
App Launcher enhancements
You can now search for apps or object pages more quickly and without opening the App Launcher overlay that covers your full screen.
Now when you first click on the "waffle" icon you see a search bar and list of your top apps in a mini version of the app menu first. If you need to view all apps and tabs, just click the View All link at the bottom.
Other App Launcher enhancements include better handling of the descriptions of apps -- previously truncated descriptions would break mid-word and now they don't, and smoother drag-and-drop behavior when reordering the app tiles.
Enhanced Related Lists
Enhanced Related Lists let you add more columns to your related list -- up to 10, just like in Classic -- and also let you sort and resize your columns or wrap the text. This lets you see more data at a glance, without having to click into each related record.
Access Reports and Dashboards in the Recycle Bin
In the last major Salesforce update, they brought the Recycle Bin over from Classic, but you still needed to go back to Classic if you had to restore a Report or Dashboard that had been mistakenly deleted. Now you can access deleted Reports and Dashboards in the Lightning Recycle Bin!
2. Reporting
Salesforce has made some major improvements to their reporting functionality in this release. Note that these new features are only available if you're running Salesforce reports in Lightning.
Count unique values in report results
Have you ever wanted to know how many unique donors are in a Donation-based report, where some donors may have given more than one gift? What about seeing how many Ticket Orders are represented in a report based on Ticket Order Items? This new reporting feature lets you do that (without having to create any Power-of-One formula fields)!
Choose the "Show Unique Count" option for the column that you want to count in order to get this important data point. It will be displayed at the grand total line at the bottom of the report as well as with any subtotals if your report is grouped.
Filter reports with field-to-field comparisons
You can also now compare the values of two different report fields and use the result as a filter in the Lightning Report Builder. For example, you can now filter a report so that it only shows you Accounts where the "Amount Donated This Fiscal Year" field is less than the "Amount Donated Last Fiscal Year".
Speed up the report editing process in Lightning by turning off automatic preview updates
When creating or editing a report in Lightning, if you're working with a lot of data, sometimes the preview section can take a long time to finish reloading sample data between edits. Though the live preview is great when you're learning, if you're already comfortable building reports and using the Lighting Report Builder it can slow you down.
This new option lets you turn off the automatic preview updates while you work on your edits. Once you've finished the edits you can toggle the preview back on to view the sample results before running your report.
3. Security changes that may affect other apps
Do you use Volunteers for Salesforce? If so, this likely applies to you!
Salesforce is making changes to improve security, and those changes affect Site Guest Users. If you have a non-PatronManager app that involves a Salesforce site integration (like Volunteers for Salesforce if you allow your volunteers to sign up for shifts online), those app developers may send you instructions to adjust your configuration.
None of our other recommended apps should be affected, and PatronManager itself is already compliant with the new Salesforce updates. If you have another third-party app installed and run into problems with it, check with your administrator or the app developer.
That's it for this release!
This is also how we feel when there are so many exciting new things at once!