We've gotten feedback from clients that selling tickets at the box office on the night of a show wasn't always as fast and easy as it should be, so we're happy to announce our solution to that problem: Box Office Express. Designed specifically for walk-up sales, this new feature lets you sell tickets a third faster than the classic "Quick Order Form." (We know it's this fast because we tested it with a bunch of your real box office users already, and we timed the results!)

You'll find the link to Box Office Express in the Custom Links sidebar on the home page, and at the top of the PatronTicket Orders tab.

Continuing with the theme of making things faster: now, certain online ticket orders will now be qualified automatically. Any ticket order with name and address information that exactly matches an existing contact record in PatronManager will automatically be associated with that contact upon submission.

Our social media integration just got better. Just as your patrons can choose to share their purchases on Facebook, they can now also post them to Twitter. When you enter your organization's Twitter handle on the PatronTicket Settings page, the default text of their tweet will automatically "mention" you by name.

If any of their friends click on the link and buy tickets to the same event, the Order Source of that purchase will automatically be set to "Twitter."

To set this up in your account, go to the PatronTicket Settings tab, check the "Post to Twitter" box and enter your organization's Twitter handle.

New ADA regulations require that wheelchair-accessible and companion seating be made available online in the same capacity as other online ticketing. With PatronManager's new Seat Notes feature, you can tag specific seats with these attributes and let online purchasers know that they're buying accessible seating.

When printing ticket orders marked with the "Ship" delivery method, you can now print "header cards" that include the purchaser's name and shipping address, so that you can stuff envelopes and mail tickets quickly and easily.

We need to make a few changes to your ticket template in order to activate this feature, so please contact us if you want to start using these ticket header cards.

Certainly useful, though perhaps not the most exciting-sounding new feature: Improved error reporting and payment exception resolution screens for credit card donations will help you complete transactions with processing errors.

We've added one brand-new CRM Snapshot, and upgraded two others, so that you can now run certain queries on the Account (Household) level, not just the Contact level.

That means when you're looking for a list of first-time ticket buyers, you can be sure that the list only includes people whose whole HOUSEHOLD is a "first-time buyer;" or when looking for patrons who donated a certain amount in the last year, you can see the results for the whole household, not just the individual members.

In order to more closely control when your message arrives in your patrons' inboxes, you can now set a Send Time for your PatronMail campaigns. First thing in the morning? Lunchtime? After work? It's up to you.

Just enter a time in addition to the desired date when you're creating your campaign, and the e-mail will be sent at the top of the next hour after the time you choose (so 3:23 becomes 4:00, for example).

You might be thinking now, "Well, what's the BEST time to send our e-mails?" There's no magic-bullet answer for all organizations -- research data varies widely by industry and even by individual organization. The best way to find out the answer for your own e-mail list is to conduct your own research to find out what time of day your open rates are the highest.  For instance, try sending a campaign to half of your list in the morning, and sending the same campaign to the other half of your patrons later in the afternoon, and then take a look at your open and click rates to learn if there's any noticeable difference.

You can view your open and click-through rates by navigating to the PatronMail tab in PatronManager and selecting the Campaign in question. You can also compare your average open & click rates to those of ALL PatronMail users by logging in to PatronMail itself and clicking on the "Benchmark Stats" link in the Campaigns menu. (The average open rate for all PatronMail campaigns is currently 19.05%.)

With Salesforce's Summer ‘12 release (coming in early June), Chatter Messenger will automatically be enabled in your account. Chatter Messenger is a new Chatter feature that offers one-to-one and multi-person instant messaging capabilities -- like GChat or Facebook chat.

Chatter Messenger will work in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari.

(And later in the year, Chatter Messenger will also include a screen-sharing feature! We're pretty excited about that one.)

Validation rules improve your data quality by automatically checking and verifing that the data a user enters in a record meets the standards you specify, before the user can save the record.

(For example: Say you always want the street address of a Contact in PatronManager to be formatted as "St." rather than "Street." You could set up a Validation Rule to remind users to input "St." when creating or qualifying contacts.)

We've made a few changes to the ticket order Qualification process that make it possible to use Validation Rules in your PatronManager account. Please contact Client Services if you're interested and we can help you set them up.

When you issue a full refund on an order that includes PatronTech fees (that is, we collected a fee for that ticket sale), we refund that fee to you in turn.

But up until now, we haven't been able to give back our fees to you when an order is only partially refunded (like if you refund only one out of two tickets in the order). This release changes that, and lets us refund the fees in every case.

Simple summary: If you don't make money on a ticket sale, neither do we. When you refund money to a patron, we refund our fees for that ticket to you.

When you write in to client services to report a bug or issue, we often reply letting you know it's been passed on to the product development team to be resolved. We mean it! Here's a quick rundown of some of the issues we've fixed this time around:

• Exchanged Ticket Order Items not getting attached to Accounts properly
• Access Codes links to "All Events" and "Event" page not working
• Double-clicking to submit an exchange can create a double-charge
• Venue info isn’t appearing in confirmation emails
• $0 ticket orders should always be marked as comps
• Duplicate fulfillment items created when selling GA or Pick Later subscriptions and single tickets in same order
• “Modify Selected Items” causing seating problems
• CC Refund cutoff using wrong date field
• Allow a refund to be issued on Partially Paid orders if there's only one payment (and thus only one transaction ID)

That's it for this round! As always, please let us know if you have questions or comments -- especially about Box Office Express! Make sure to submit a case from the Client Community.

Thanks!