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January 2023 Release Notes: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/1637935
Welcome to the first PatronManager release of 2022! We're starting off the year with household memberships, allowing you to designate particular memberships that cover all Contacts within an Account. Member perks are applied automatically to all household members, and you can easily convert existing memberships to the new version.
This release also contains pick your own seat subscriptions, allowing online buyers to choose their own seats when buying a season subscription. Toggle the feature on and off by package, giving you complete control over seating whenever you prefer.
You'll also find improvements for Donations made alongside Ticket Orders, ensuring accurate reporting and streamlined acknowledgment for those gifts while reducing effort for your staff.
Read on to learn all about these exciting updates and more:
- Household Memberships
- Pick Your Own Seat Subscriptions
- Streamlined Ticket Order Donations
- Other Improvements
Heads up: if you use the calendar view on your PTS, you must republish your theme after this release to apply your brand colors to the improved calendar.
Let's take a look!
Is your organization ready for the Salesforce Spring 23 release, coming in February? This is separate from the PatronManager release, and Enhanced Domains and Multi-Factor Authentication are both required.
If your organization hasn't enabled both features, be sure to do so by the end of January. Check out a recording of our recent webinar on the subject here.
Household Memberships
Does your organization sell memberships that apply to a whole household or family, rather than just an individual Contact? With a quick adjustment to your Benefit Levels, you can now automatically apply badges and perks like automatic discounts to all the Contacts in a member Account.
Designating a particular kind of membership as applying to households (vs individuals) is easy, and takes effect overnight! All household members will receive a member badge (which is also visible in PatronManager Box Office) as well as automatic perks like discounts or presale access.
Additional Contacts in a Household won't receive access to PatronPortal automatically (just the primary member who purchased the membership), but you can enable additional Contacts for Portal manually if you wish.
We recommend one Portal license per household in most cases, so that you don't use up your paid licenses for folks who are unlikely to log in and purchase tickets.
To enable household memberships in PatronManager, you'll take two steps. Expand the steps below for instructions:
There's a new built-in Account badge which will appear for any Account that contains a member Contact. There are also two new informational Account fields that display the Benefit Level and Membership Type (e.g. "Gold | Individual") as well as the expiration date for easy reference.
We recommend adding all three fields to the Account page layout, perhaps in a new "Membership Info" section. Here are the fields to look for when adjusting your Account page layouts:
- Member Status (badge)
- Latest Account Membership
- Latest Membership Expiration
Equivalent fields also exist on the Contact Object - if you haven't added those to Contact page layouts since they came out in the April 2022 release, we recommend updating those page layouts too!
Note that all these fields update on a nightly basis, so when you make changes to a Benefit Level or when a patron buys a membership, you'll see the effect on those fields the next day.
If you'd like to see more granular detail, like the name of the Contact who purchased the membership or a list of all past memberships, you can also add the Benefits related list to the Account page layout.
Ready to make these adjustments, but unfamiliar with the process? Head over here for detailed instructions on editing page layouts.
To designate your household memberships, head over to Membership Setup via the PatronTicket Hub:
Edit any Benefit Levels you'd like to designate as applying to a Household, change the Membership Type from Individual to Household, and save!
That's all there is to it! Note that badges and rollup fields update nightly, so you'll see the visual effect of your changes the next day.
If you don't see the badges and rollups at all, make sure you updated your page layouts as indicated in the previous section.
Pick Your Own Seat Subscriptions
PatronManager's Pick Your Own Seat Subscriptions feature is now generally available!
That means your patrons can assemble the set of shows they want to see and choose the exact seats they prefer for each show, reducing stress and effort in your box office and increasing patron satisfaction. You can also toggle the feature on and off by package anytime, giving you complete control over seating anytime you need it.
Ready to learn more and get started? Check out this article for a complete overview of PYOS Subscriptions.
Streamlined Ticket Order Donations
Prior to this release, each gift made along with a Ticket Order had to be qualified separately, which meant there was a gap between when the gift was made and when the Donation record itself was created in the system. While the transaction was recorded accurately, the process of creating that separate Donation record sometimes dropped off the to-do list during staff turnover. If those tasks weren't completed, reports based on Donations (including things like program listings by donor level) would be inaccurate and donor acknowledgments would also be delayed or missed.
This release ensures accurate record-keeping and reports, allows you to configure immediate acknowledgment for donors with your preferred language, and reduces effort for your staff. And if you've fallen behind on qualifying Ticket Order Donations, don't worry: we added a bit of extra magic that will also tidy up those older records for you.
Here's where your new conditional (and customizable) acknowledgment text for these gifts will appear:
To take full advantage of this new feature, be sure to set up your new automated acknowledgment text for Ticket Order Donations. If you still prefer to handle some acknowledgments manually, we've got tips for that as well. Check out the step-by-step instructions here!
Other Improvements
With each release, we enhance elements of PatronManager features and tidy up bits of unexpected behavior. Here's what else is new this month:
At PatronManager, we believe strongly in accessibility, consider accessibility standards in our design process, and take best practices seriously. The November 2022 release brought the Public Ticketing Site (PTS) up to date with the latest guidelines to ensure a good experience for patrons who use assistive devices like screen readers or navigate using the keyboard.
This release improves on that work with minor updates to ensure accessibility on the PTS as follows:
- Fixed a keyboard navigation issue with the Event Calendar View
- Fixed a contrast issue with the Cart Timer
- Improved keyboard focus on modals
- Enhanced visibility for error/warning messages
If you use the Event Calendar on your Public Ticketing Site, you must republish your theme after the release so that the improved calendar will use your organization's brand colors.
The recently-added "Anonymous Purchase" checkbox in PatronManager Box Office (PMBO) permits selling a ticket without collecting any identifying information from your patron, for example during quick walk-up sales.
We heard feedback from several clients that they still prefer to collect zip codes or country from those patrons to understand where their patrons are coming from, for use in things like grant applications and marketing tasks. Now you can!
If the "Anonymous Purchase" checkbox is marked, you can still populate any/all of the City, State, Zip Code, and Country fields on the Order, without triggering a requirement for further patron data.
If you enter any identifying information, like an email address, a phone number, or shipping details, you will be required to enter a name.
PatronManager strongly recommends collecting names and email addresses from your patrons whenever possible. Building those ever-important patron relationships is only possible when you know who your patrons are, and the few extra seconds spent building a rapport can really pay off when cultivating your donor base or encouraging ticket buyers to return and/or tell their friends.
Having adequate data for each interaction is what makes it possible to build a complete picture of your patrons and communicate with them as individuals. It also makes keeping a clean database so much easier!
PatronManager previously had a tab called "PatronSignup Setup" and a separate tab called "PatronSignup Settings", which was confusing even for us.
To make it easier to understand what's what, the tab that contains your Signup Forms is now called, well, "Signup Forms", while the tab that contains system settings is still called "PatronSignup Settings". Hurrah for clarity!
Have you ever had a patron call up to ask a question in the middle of buying tickets online, then want to complete their Order in the box office? Previously, it was (intentionally) difficult to find those in-progress online Orders - and the reason for that still applies:
Never open an online Draft Ticket Order unless the patron has asked for help or abandoned their Order.
The act of opening an online Draft Order, let alone making any changes, can cause system conflicts and error messages for your patron!
Because there are sometimes good reasons, though (like the example above), there is now a list view in the PatronTicket Orders tab that shows all in-progress online drafts. Please use it with care: if in doubt, don't touch those Orders!
Draft Ticket Orders are automatically deleted after the cart timer expires or after an hour, whichever comes first.
Note that there is a expected lag of up to five minutes between the cart timer expiring and a Ticket Order being completely purged from the system. During that time, the Order may appear in the "In-Progress Online Orders" list view, but with a Status of "Deleted".
This is normal: it will drop off the list after a few minutes (you may need to refresh the page).
As planned, Box Office Express was fully retired with this release; PatronManager Box Office is your ticket (and subscription, and membership) selling tool. That change left us with an extra space on the PatronTicket Hub, so we did a little rearranging:
- "Qualify Orders" is now on the top row
- "Batch Print Tickets" moved up to the second row
- "Membership Setup" is now a tile on the bottom row, making it easy to access Memberships and Benefits (for example, when you're ready to set up those Household Memberships!)
We're continuing to improve PatronManager Box Office, and with two recently-added badges to help you easily recognize subscribers and members, the header of a Ticket Order was getting a bit crowded (especially on small screens)!
Some of our clients also found the contact information that previously appeared in the header a bit confusing, since it was drawn from the Contact record which doesn't necessarily match what's on the Ticket Order.
To alleviate confusion and free up some space, now the header bar contains just the patron's name, as well as any badges they may have:
If you'd like to view the email address or phone number on the Ticket Order, head to the Buyer Info section of the Order:
Or if you want to view the information on the related Contact record, clicking the patron's name on a completed and qualified Order will take you right to their Contact.
That's all for this release!
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