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April 2023 Release Notes: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/1664904
Check out the latest PatronManager features going live this month! This release includes automated tax deductible memberships, allowing you to seamlessly sell a membership while counting all or part of it as contributed revenue and recognizing patrons appropriately for the donation portion. You'll also find accessibility improvements for Signup Forms, box office updates, and more. Read on to learn all about:
Let's take a look!
Prefer watching to reading?
Check out this recording of the release webinar for all the details, plus a demo and lot of discussion about memberships!
Automated Memberships That Include a Donation
Do you consider some or all of the cost of a membership to be a donation? Good news: PatronManager Memberships can now separate fair market value from the donated portion!
That means you can ensure that your donors are recognized appropriately for the donation amount, split out the contributed revenue in your financial reporting as needed, and even sell discounted memberships where the donation portion is calculated automatically. All while taking advantage of automated membership functionality to ensure that Benefits and Portal access are granted to your new members immediately!
To set up tax deductible memberships, all you have to do is define the fair market value for each membership you sell.
PatronManager will then automatically track the difference between the membership cost and the fair market value with a Donation record, so that it counts toward Donation rollup fields and is reportable alongside other Donations for things like tax letters and acknowledgements.
The patron's confirmation email will show the donation portion of their purchase, and your conditional donation text (defined in PatronTicket Settings) will appear in the email automatically as well.
Need to refund a membership, or exchange it for one at a different membership level? No problem - the system will automatically back out the donated portion when you process the refund or exchange from the member's Ticket Order - no extra steps.
Financial reports are based on the transaction, so you won't double-count actual income, and you'll see the tax deductible portion of membership sales indicated on those reports for your bookkeeping as well. For example, here's a section of the Daily Sales Report:
Need to set up memberships in PatronManager? Learn all about the process here.
Accessibility Updates for Signup Forms
PatronManager Signup Forms give you an easy way to invite patrons to join your email list and add them directly to PatronManager. In this release, they got an accessibility update!
Specifically, we made sure that the forms are compatible with screen readers and other assistive devices, so that field labels are read properly and required fields are marked as such.
PatronManager is dedicated to accessibility, and we aim to meet or exceed WCAG 2.1 level AA accessibility guidelines on all patron-facing sites. We welcome feedback from you and your patrons if you encounter areas with room for improvement.
Other Improvements and Fixes
With each release, we enhance elements of PatronManager features and tidy up bits of unexpected behavior. Here's what else is new this month:
In a recent release we removed the Contact Phone and Contact Email from the header in PatronManager Box Office, to give more space for badges and to avoid confusion in cases where the information on the Ticket Order differed from that on the Contact.
Since then, clients suggested quite a lot of Product Ideas to let us know that you wanted this information back, and we heard you! We brought it back, but a little differently than it worked before. The information is now drawn from the Ticket Order rather than the Contact to avoid any confusion/discrepancies, and it's a bit smaller to ensure plenty of room for those lovely badges. Here's an example:
Helping patrons purchase more tickets is a good thing, and with this release the option to do so is easier to find. Instead of a link that tended to get lost in the text on the page, there's now a more obvious button in the cart:
On mouse-over, the button takes on the action color for added visibility:
Many clients included the Ticket Order Number (technically the Order Name) as a merge field in confirmation emails, but we noticed it was often inadvertently removed in the course of editing those templates.
Since the Order Number is a crucial reference for the patron to have if there are any questions about their Order, it's now baked right into the templates, above the table:
While the Public Ticketing Site is compatible with tools like Google Translate, in the past this could lead to the Delivery Method value being recorded in PatronManager in translated form, which could cause reporting issues and exclude certain Ticket Orders from batch printing or task creation.
This has been fixed; patrons using translation tools will still see the translated value for the Delivery Method, but the value recorded in PatronManager will be the system-designated value for the field.
In February we released a new version of the Mobile Box Office Android app. The latest version of the app requires Android 11 or later, but prior to this release, older versions of the app were still supported. With this release, older versions of the app are obsolete, and only the current version of the app will run on an Android tablet.
That's all for this release!
Want to be part of the product development process? Log in to the Client Community to suggest and vote on Product Ideas, track suggestions your organization has given us in the past, see what's planned and in progress, and much more. Read All About Product Ideas to get started!
