Do you currently run or plan to run events that need handling registrations, such as workshops, training classes, non-profit fund-raisers, corporate conferences, or even a large-scale event such as a trade exhibit, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event registrations is a complex process. You need to manage scheduling, dates, registration numbers, data entry, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event registrants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give you more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based website, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily create your event and start accepting online bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing systems.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating event participants to perform the registration by themselves.
Letting your clients to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you spend more of your time on planning a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional add ons when you need added features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new registrations 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process can remain entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information you collect from event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to users via standard features (these come with the software) and additional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique built-in to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and implement. Ready to start accepting registrations in no time.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you collect specific data using a custom event registration form on your site to create a tailored experience for your customers.
- Event Calendar. Registrants can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospective attendees so they can purchase the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary registrant’s information for any additional attendees.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the risk of spammers and bot software programs creating fake registrations on your web site with reCAPTCHA tools to confirm human activity.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track your attendees.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of registrants and check in everyone who attends.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Control who can attend your events.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Record notes about users on their profile and how you’ve assisted your customers. Private notes allows you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve helped your customers.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you build an event page over time without publishing it to your website. You can keep editing your events until you are ready to publish it live on your site, or schedule to publish your event pages at a future date and time.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to be used throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Your organization fields include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, phone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Upload Event Data. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing capability that allows you to easily upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Venue Manager. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets details about venues to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform users of your event’s location. The venue profile has many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you reuse venue information like venue capacity, venue site URL, phone number, venue location details, location map, etc. You can also display venues throughout various areas in your WordPress theme as well as on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage each attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Staff Member Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as staff member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in any event description.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize the page templates to display events in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over the content of your event pages and how your information displays to your readers.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from the workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, Event Espresso’s aim is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their goals, the software has been built using a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes customer data in confirmation emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow customers to significantly expand the capabilities of the event management process.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display your upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events management add-on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many events in advance as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking on a category name displays the events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Events Social Sharing Addon: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files add-on provides PHP files that let you bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to each seat.
- Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing add-on adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. People can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories using a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add on enables other software applications, web tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso information through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso rocks! I use it for my dance class registrations. Unlike most dance studios where people have to call or send an email in advance, Event Espresso puts a registration form right there in front of the user and allows me to collect valuable information from the user during the registration process with custom questions such as “Do you have previous dance experience?” or “How did you hear about us?”. It also gives my site a professional look and feel.” Ral, Ral’eau Salsa Dance Company
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”I played around with the free version for a couple hours then purchased the Pro for a client. Love it and so do they! Sweetest Event plugin I have tried.” Bill Chambers, Bill Chambers Design
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, show promoter, or event consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the support forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive technical support, as so many of its clients confirm:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
Event Espresso provides robust support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, one-on-one 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This license lets you install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This allows you to install Event Espresso on five domains. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This 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 software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run an event that requires managing dates and venues, enrolling attendees, and/or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
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