Do you currently run or plan to run events that need handling registrations, such as workshops, training classes, charity fund raisers, corporate events, or even a big event like a trade show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You have to manage event schedules, date availability, attendee numbers, data processing, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily reproduce previously-run events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be very costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule multiple events and begin receiving registrations in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been redeveloped 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 retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
For more details go here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
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 and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling event participants to enrol by themselves.
Allowing your customers to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more resources on planning a more enjoyable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add-ons only if you need new features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event signups outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process can remain entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information you obtain from event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its users through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure as many types of tickets as you want and set separate prices, limits on ticket quantities, etc.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with the WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with leading payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments prior to running your events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows event managers to customize the look and control settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the likelihood of spamming and bot software programs making fake registrations on your website with reCAPTCHA option that confirm human activity.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. Set up promotion and multiple discount codes to incentivize visitors to make a decision immediately, or make your offers more appealing for others. Also useful if you want to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your clients are and how you have previously done business with your clients. The Contact Profile page stores the name, biography, contact information, event registration information, private comments, etc. about each registrant.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective participants can join a waiting list if your event has reached maximum attendance. You can also specify that wait-listed attendees pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential attendees to ask questions about your event and previous participants to post reviews that can help others consider whether or not to register. Moderation settings for commenting are configured via the WP native commenting settings.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you develop your event page over time without publishing it to your website. You can work on your event until you are ready to publish it live to your site, or schedule to publish your event page at a later time and date.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of every aspect of your event’s registration and ticketing, and also allows you to automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, custom event designs, payment processing, list waiting, limits on attendees, print-ready tickets and more.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can automatically set up as your default ticket for all new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Multiple Attendee Bookings. EE 4 allows a single person or an organization to buy multiple tickets and different ticket types at the same time. Event managers specify how many attendees can enroll in a single registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Attendee Profiles. Manage each registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily accessible.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential clients who have not fully paid for their registration with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will reference pre-registered customers who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the amount they owe, and include a link to the event information, a payment link and a url where they can download the invoice.
- Accurate Event Participant Management. You control your customers’ records; who has registered, for what event and how much they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your clients individually or all at once.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are fully compatible with WordPress.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registrations for normal website traffic when website maintenance is required. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: 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 and highly effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service fee to all tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Add-Ons
As well as a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow software users to significantly enhance the functionality of your event management system.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display your scheduled events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that occur within a certain date range.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: This add-on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on can display your events in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add-on is great 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 offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to every seat.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode 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 barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template add-on gives event managers a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you modify the design 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 templates provided as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on lets you automatically register attendees to a selected mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
Testimonials
Here are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:
”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”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
“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 gym owner, presenter, event promoter, or event professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, search the forums for useful ideas and practical ways to improve your event management process or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as many of its satisfied plugin users 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
The Event Espresso software provides amazing 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 a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This lets you set up Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you run Event Espresso on 5 domains. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
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.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
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.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular situation, or to notify developers about problems and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run events that require scheduling dates and venues, booking attendees, or booking seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Plugin
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