PatronManager Help

August 2012 Release Notes

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August 2012 Release Notes: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/74042

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Hi PatronManager clients, we're pleased to announce the release of fifteen new features and upgrades to PatronManager. We've got improvements to ticket printing, many new buyer fee options, and something new: we're announcing several "on-demand" reporting features that won't appear in your account right away, but when you request them, we'll create customized versions just for you. Read on for details about this and other updates.

-- Box Office Features --

1. Batch Printing

We now support batch printing "for real" -- no more running reports and copy/pasting. There are two methods of batch printing tickets: Subscription-based (for printing whole subscription orders containing tickets to multiple events) and Event Instance-based (for printing all the Will Call tickets for a particular performance, for example).

Here’s what it looks like:

You can batch print subscription orders by going to the “Subscription Ticket Printing” tab (remember, if you don't see a tab across the top of your screen, click the plus sign to see a list of all tabs); and you can batch print tickets for a particular Event Instance by clicking the “Print Tickets” button on the Event Instance page within the Event Inventory tab.

Once you choose what tickets you want to print, you can choose from several options. You can filter which tickets you want to print based on whether they’ve been printed before, what the delivery method is, and payment status.

You can also include header cards, the organization information page, receipts, and signature capture receipts. (Receipt tickets will only print for Credit Card orders.) In subscription-based printing, you can choose to sort by performance date or by seat.

2.  New Fields for Printing on Point-of-Sale Tickets / New Header Cards

The following fields can now be added to your point-of-sale ticket layout:

  • Instance Date
  • Venue Address
  • Buyer Name

We've also added a new field in PatronTicket Settings that will let you print an additional 60 characters of text on every ticket. Some examples: “No Refunds/Exchanges” or “No Late Seating”. You can add this text yourself on the PatronTicket Settings tab, and then contact us to add it to the printed ticket.

As with all ticket layout changes, please contact us for help adding any of these fields to your tickets.

Also, because several clients requested it after the last release, header cards can now be printed for all delivery methods, not just shipping. For Will Call, Walk-Up, and E-mail orders, they'll show just the buyer's name instead of her address; if the order is not paid in full, the header card can also include the amount due.

3. Improved Ticket Exchange Experience

We've streamlined the ticket exchange page to make it less confusing and cluttered. Now you’ll only see the effective prices of each ticket, any item fees that were applied, the total, and the difference in cost.

This should make it simpler to decide what to do when exchanging tickets: you can either charge the actual price difference between the old and new items, or you can force an equal exchange and charge nothing. No more manually editing fields and doing math yourself!

Plus, you can simply add an "exchange fee" on to the transaction, in accordance with whatever your exchange policy states:

4. Subscription Ticket Returns

We now support "ticket turnbacks" -- you can "refund" subscription fulfillment items as Donations, returning the seat to inventory, and the resulting donation record will be associated with the original ticket order.

5. Redesigned PatronTicket Settings Page

We've reorganized the PatronTicket Settings page and grouped settings into categories, to make it easier for you to find things and make changes without our help.

If it's been a while since you've looked at this tab (click on the "+" to access the list of all tabs!), go check it out -- you'll find some new options there that might interest you.

Here are a few of them!

6. New "Walk-up" Delivery Method

Walk-up is now a supported delivery method in PatronManager, for when patrons buy tickets directly from you at the box office:

It won’t ever appear on your public ticketing site when patrons place orders online; and all Box Office Express orders are marked "Walk-up" automatically.

7. Support for Different Fees on Different Delivery Methods

Up until now, you've been able to set a fee to charge for "Shipped" orders, but we've heard from clients that you want to be able to set other fees for other delivery methods, too. Now on the PatronTicket Settings tab, you can define separate fees for each delivery method:

8. More Buyer Per-Ticket Fee Options

You have your own unique ticket fee policies, and we want to support them. We've heard from clients that you want more flexibility with subscriber fees, so in this release we're giving you two new options:

1. Choose to waive single ticket fees when purchased as add-ons to subscription orders (so that your subscribers don't have to pay extra fees);

2. Choose to waive all delivery fees on subscriptions

You can access these options from the PatronTicket Settings tab.

9. New Contact Lookup Field on Quick Order Form

If you've used Box Office Express, you know there's a cool auto-complete Contact Lookup field on the order form there. Since people liked it so much, we've added it to the Quick Order Form:

When you start typing in a patron’s name in the “Existing Contact” field, you’ll now see a dropdown list of possible matches to choose from.

10. Consistent & Correct "State" Values: New Picklist on Public Ticketing Site, Quick Order Form, and Box Office Express

When placing ticket orders, you can now display the State address field as a picklist instead of a text field, eliminating errors and data inconsistency. That means that instead of patrons or box office reps having to type in the state name by hand, they'll choose from a dropdown of two-letter state abbreviations:

The feature is turned on by default, and populated with all U.S. states. We can add or change the values (like adding Canadian provinces!) or revert it back to a text field if you prefer, so please let us know if that will work better for your organization.

-- Fundraising Features --

11. Amount Donated In Last "X" Days

Many of you have asked for a field that calculates the amount that a donor has contributed in the last year instead of the last Fiscal Year -- or the past 18 months, or 6 months, or any other time period that’s "rolling."

We’ve added a new field to the Account that does just this:

You can specify how many days you’d like it to roll up by entering a number in the field on the Organization Settings tab.

12. Automatic Major Donor Badge  **On-demand Feature**

PatronManager can now display Contact and/or Account records with a colorful "Major Donor" badge, so that reps can more easily see that the person they’re on the phone with is a major donor to your organization:

You pick the threshold of giving, and the badge will automatically appear when the record is pulled up, on either the Account or Contact level. You can also choose to have MULTIPLE badges, like "bronze," "silver," and "gold" level donors, with different badges for each of those classifications.

Contact us to request your own custom version of this "on-demand" feature.

13. Board Give/Get Scorecard Report **On-demand Feature**

For organizations with a “give or get” policy for your Board Members, this report lets you track the money that Board members have brought in, either by donating themselves, or by soliciting donations from others against a goal:

Let us know how you categorize Contacts and Board Members, and what your give/get threshold is, and we can create this report for you.

14. Development Progress Dashboard **On-demand Feature**

An exciting-looking dashboard, full of gauges that track your progress towards fundraising goals in different areas:

At the beginning of each fiscal year, the dashboard will automatically reset. The goals and groupings can be adjusted, just let us know what works for you.

15. Donation Amount Distribution Report & Chart **On-demand Feature**

This dashboard shows the dollar-amount distribution of all the donations you've taken in, letting you see how much of your donor base is making smaller vs. larger gifts:

Do you get more $5 donations or $50 donations? How reliant are you on major gifts from foundations? This report can help to inform Development department strategies.

You can choose the ranges of dollar amounts to group by for this distribution report.

One of the benefits of using PatronManager is that the Salesforce.com platform offers an app store of over 1,000 business apps that plug seamlessly into PatronManager. Many of these are free or discounted for non-profit organizations, and new apps are being added all the time. You can browse apps by going to appexchange.salesforce.com.

That said, we know that sorting through hundreds of apps can be daunting. So we’ve created a curated list of apps that we think will allow you to get more value out of PatronManager. We'll add to this list over time as we find and test new apps to share with you.

Visit the PatronManager Help tab in your account to find our list of recommended apps.

-- Important Bug Fixes --

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:

- Patron Data Qualifier language and filter improvements

- Daily Sales Report handles refunds correctly now

- Allow partial payments on high-value ticket orders (over $10K)

- Subscription fulfillment fixes (making manual fulfillment easier to get right; dealing with seat assignment problems)

- Box Office Express now applies Order Fee

- Credit Card payment method was not available for some ticket orders, now it is

- Support larger venues with more seats

- Added "Country" field for ticket orders

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