Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need handling registrations, such as seminars, training classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, networking conferences, or even a large-scale event like an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations is a complex process. You may need to manage event schedules, date availability, participant numbers, data collection, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for similar events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily schedule an event and begin accepting online bookings in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the plugin is being rebuilt using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing levels 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 increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for attendees to complete the registration process themselves.
Letting your attendees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more attention on creating a better event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a 3rd party provider. This is made possible through a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy addons only if you need added features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event registrations any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with friends who may also be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process is completed wholly in digital form, reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information gathered from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to website owners. Here are just a few:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Ready to use in very little time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to create as many different types of tickets as you need and specify separate prices, number of tickets, and more.
- Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. You can customize your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and components, as well as HTML or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants and let them choose the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary registrant’s information for any additional registrants.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the risk of spamming and bots making bogus registrations by using reCAPTCHA option that provide human validation.
- Promotional Codes. Provide promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage visitors to make a decision now, or make your offers more appealing for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical for helping to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you have done business with them. The Contact Profile page records the name, biography, contact details, event registration details, comments, etc. about each client.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Control who can participate in your events.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Record comments about users on their profile and how you’ve interacted with them. Private commenting helps you keep a record of when event attendees contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve assisted them.
- Keyword Rich Event Page Web Links. Keyword rich event page URLs leverage your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly urls that include topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your content and improves your search rankings, helping you get a more targeted audience to your events.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to display throughout the plugin and your WP themes. The organization information include: company name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, telephone number, tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Bulk Import Events. EE 4 provides an advanced importing feature that lets you easily import a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload details about events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows details about a venue to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your website to inform registrants of your event’s location. The venue profile has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays information like venue seating capacity, venue site URL, venue phone number, venue address, Google map, etc. You can also display venues on various parts on your theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a specific venue.
- Automatic Software Upgrading. Event Espresso offers easy 1-click upgrading to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your plugin installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your website visitors can tell others about your event using social media share buttons.
- Attendee Reporting. Event reporting gives you data of all registrations and transactions, allowing you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and how much money you’ve collected.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for most users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 permits more complex developments and customizations to the application.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular website traffic when you need to perform maintenance on your site. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their site, Event Espresso’s objective 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 and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the need to re-enter event information when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service fee to all tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Add ons
As well as an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to significantly expand the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display all scheduled events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Calendar Table Template Addon: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to display an event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: This add on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your attendees to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event prices when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered website users can have access to your special events. Members can also enter personal details into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also view previous events and make payment for future events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart addon is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add on lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing addon gives you the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the door. Registrants 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 Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template addon provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to edit the look and feel of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also lets developers design custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing software addon, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track registrations, and accept payments from your website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
Plugin Users – Testimonials
Below are some of the many great testimonials that plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”EventEspresso saves us money, saves our secretary 16-24 hours and looks so professionally done that people ask us how we do it; which we happily tell them, “Event Espresso, and be sure to get the ticketing add-on.”” David, House of Prayer
”Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
“Love the plugin, we only use it once a year for a race we have in February. This saved us tons of time in data entry. In addition, we had more runners register than any other year. We attribute that to the ease of registering online. Thanks for your work.” Ed, Friends of Oscar Scherer Park
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, festival planner, or event consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, visit the forums for useful ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as so many of its end-users confirm:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
The Event Espresso software provides incredible support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email support and even a monthly VIP member pass that gives 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License Edition – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This option lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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.
Use the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP website owners.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you plan to run any event that involves scheduling dates, times and venues, booking participants, and/or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Software
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