Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings, such as seminars, training courses, charity fundraisers, marketing conferences, or even a big event like a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event bookings can be a complex process. You will probably need to co-ordinate scheduling, availability, attendee numbers, data processing, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily replicate previously-run events, give you more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered web site, you can set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin allows you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the software is being redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using the plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits 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 website or blog into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event participants to enroll by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your energy on delivering a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party provider. This is made possible through a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add ons only if you need new features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online sign-ups 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features and addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process remains wholly in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information you collect from event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to end-users through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that users can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to web site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure multiple ticket types and specify unique pricing options, ticket quantity limits, etc.
- Customized Notification Email Message. Configure automated registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with event customers.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects so they can purchase the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and display registrant data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing of your default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event attendees when they show up, or sending in paper-based forms for manual processing later.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. Additionally, you can make it a requirement wait-list registrants pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- Public Commenting. Add social interactivity to your event by encouraging potential registrants to ask questions about your event and past customers to post reviews that can help others choose whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for commenting are configured via the WordPress native commenting system.
- Keyword-Rich URLs. Keyword-rich event page Web links leverage your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” urls with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you get more traffic to your website.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your WordPress themes. The organization information include: organization name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email address, telephone, tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Import Event Data. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that enables you to easily upload a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and upload information about events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue manager feature in Event Espresso 4 allows information about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform visitors of your event’s location. The venue profile has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes details such as venue seating capacity, venue site URL, telephone number, venue address, map, etc. You can also display venue profiles in different areas of your theme as well as on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Automatic Upgrading. Event Espresso offers easy one-click software installation upgrading to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and website visitors can help spread the word about your events using social share buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have a number of event types such as free and paid, conference speakers and breakout sessions, different kinds of courses, etc. you can categorize them to help event attendees to locate what they’re searching for. You can display all the events in a category on an event category page, make the events searchable by category, and color-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, in addition to suggesting other events in the categories that interest your existing customers.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how your information displays to visitors.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers who are potential application problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: According to the mission statement on their site, Event Espresso’s goal 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 company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – simplifies the work of re-entering event information when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to further expand the capabilities of your event management process.
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 an event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can also be customized to display an event thumbnail image instead of a date.
- Events Social Sharing Add-on: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered website users will have access to these special events. Members can also store personal data into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Users can also look up event history and pay for events.
- 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 promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price 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 adds the capacity 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 venues. 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 Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on gives event managers a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you modify 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 allows developers to build custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Add-on: The MailChimp addon lets you auto-register participants to a specified mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Here are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:
”I want to commend you on a fabulous product which is just the right price for a small non-profit. People are happy with the registration process, as are we! …Thank you SO much for a great product.” Sandra Forero Bush, World Trade Center Tacoma
”I have to say that it has been the right choice for me…I’ve been extremely pleased with the way my site is working.” Robin, RobinTime
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, workshop planner, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, spend a little time researching the forums for new ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your customers.
Product Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as so many of its satisfied clients attest:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
The plugin provides great support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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 developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to manage your events.
Product Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This edition lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license allows you to set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons 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 being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
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 plugin’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about issues and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress website and you plan to run any event that involves scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
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