Do you currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings or registrations, such as workshops, group classes, charity fund raisers, social events, or even a large-scale event like an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You may have to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and seating, attendee numbers, data processing, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can set up an inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create multiple events and begin accepting online registrations literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been rebuilt using a different structure to allow for 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 move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling attendees to complete the enrolment process by themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you focus more attention on planning a memorable event.
Complete 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 participants to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party provider. The cost is kept low through a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy optional add ons when you need added functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new bookings 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite others who may be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process remains entirely online, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data collected from your event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to website owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospects and let them purchase the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to customize the settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly by pre-configuring default ticket pricing.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Leverage promotional and multiple discount codes to incentivize people to take action without delaying, or make your offers more attractive for price-sensitive customers. Also useful if you want to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event registrants and check in those who have attended.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective participants can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached maximum attendance. You can also specify that wait-list members pre-pay if you plan to expand numbers for the event.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential attendees to interact with you online via commenting and past participants to post comments that can help others choose whether or not to register. Moderation settings for comments are set up using the WordPress built-in commenting system.
- Optimized For The Most Recent WP Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create highly aesthetic event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Multi-Language Application. Event Espresso is currently available in 15+ languages, and more translations are being added all the time.
- Exportable Information. You can output all the information gathered from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, devising new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Register Multiple Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or people to purchase multiple tickets and different ticket types simultaneously. Event managers decide how many attendees can enroll in a single registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso gives you access to an expert community of event managers and plugin users. You can engage with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event customers who have not fully paid for their enrollment with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click. Your invoices will address pre-registered customers who have not paid their registration in full by name, give them the balance they owe, and include a link to the event information, a payment link and a url to download the invoice.
- Event Reporting. Event reporting gives you data of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue has been collected.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are 100% compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to organize the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from your page.
- 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 software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the work of re-entering event details when creating new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Add ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to further enhance the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Addon: 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 Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can create as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name displays the events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- 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 prices and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered site users can have access to your special events. Members can also enter personal details into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Users can also look up past 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 for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon allows you to 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 single pricing to every seat.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to generate 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 managing check-in scans at venues. Registrants 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 add on uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events via a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp addon allows you to automatically register participants to a selected autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
Testimonials
Here are some of the testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”I am in love with your product, I work with many educational institutions that hold classes/events and I will definitely recommend this to all of them, the only time I have seen a system this comprehensive and sophisticated is when an organization I worked with paid a programmer nearly $8,000 for a custom solution, and yet still there are features in your registration system that his didn’t have. Thank you so much for your help and patience.” Abdullah J.
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, show promoter, or event professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, go through the forums for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management workflow or improve the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive technical support, as many of its customers 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
Event Espresso provides amazing support including access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to organize and manage your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This enables you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This license option allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on five domains. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its 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 using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to report errors and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues, registering attendees, and/or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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