Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community courses, charity fund raisers, social functions, or even a big event such as a food fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings is a complex and time-consuming process. You may have to manage scheduling, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data collection, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for similar events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily schedule multiple events and start accepting online bookings in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using the plugin.
For more details go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website into an automated and fully featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are enabling participants to perform the registration themselves.
Letting your participants to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more of your energy on planning a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a 3rd-party provider. This is made possible by using a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add-ons when you need additional features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online registrations any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite others who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process is transacted entirely online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data you acquire from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its customers via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Ready to use in no time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), and these can be managed from one single event.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Customize your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and elements, as well as HTML or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospective registrants and let them choose the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and display events information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the likelihood of spamming and bots making fake registrations on your site with reCAPTCHA features to provide human validation.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Set up promotion and discount codes to incentivize people to make a decision immediately, or make your offerings more attractive for others. This is also practical for helping to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you know who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can register for your events.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by allowing potential prospects to interact with you online via commenting and previous participants to post reviews that can help others decide whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for public comments are configured via the WordPress built-in commenting admin area.
- Draft Events. Draft events allow you to build your event page over time without publishing it to your site. You can work on your event until you are ready to go live, or schedule your event page to publish at a later date and time.
- Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used for your events, such as currency, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
- Exportable Data. You can output all the data collected from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for compiling reports, implementing marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Multiple Attendee Enrollments. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or a group to order multiple tickets and different ticket types at the same time. You specify how many people are able to enrol in a single registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Registrant Records. Manage each customer’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and your website visitors can spread the word about your events using social media share buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can even customize the page templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over your content and how the information displays to readers.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular site visitors whenever site maintenance is needed. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value: Event Espresso states on their website that their mission is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their mission, the company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in emails and email newsletters.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service fee to tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to significantly enhance the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Grid Template Add on: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If the event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events manager add on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can create as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to search for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Addon: This add on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your event lists in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart addon is great for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add on gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at the door. Attendees can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on lets you automatically register participants to a chosen mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Here are a few of the testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, conference planner, or event professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, go through the support forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management process and enhance the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive technical support, as many of its satisfied customers attest:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
The plugin provides incredible support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority support and even a monthly VIP member pass giving you access to community of developers, designers, event managers, publishers and webmasters that use Event Espresso tools, plus faster support response times.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider using one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a specific situation, or to report bugs and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run any event that requires managing dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
***
