Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings, such as seminars, training classes, charity fund-raisers, social conferences, or even a big event like a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations can be a complex process. You have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, event dates, registration numbers, data entry, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event participants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for repeat events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule an event and start processing bookings in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price options 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 and signups manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event attendees to enrol themselves.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more of your resources on planning a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a third-party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional add-ons only when you need extra functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event registrations 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process is conducted entirely in digital form, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Data. You own all the data obtained from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to WP users. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Ready to use in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to set up multiple ticket types and specify different pricing options, ticket quantity limits, etc.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Match your site’s look and feel for your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s template options and components, and HTML and/or CSS.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to manage taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Smart 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 details for any added attendees.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the default ticket price for the system-default ticket.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event participants when they show up, or sending in paper forms for manual registration later.
- No Ticket Events. You can set up events without the requirement for registrants to select tickets. Use Event Espresso for any kind of event, not just when tickets are needed.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Record comments about a contact on their profile and how you’ve helped them. Private notes allows you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have assisted your contacts.
- Keyword Rich Page URLs. Keyword rich URLs leverage your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly urls that use relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you get a more targeted audience to your events.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency name, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, etc.
- Bulk Upload Event Data. EE 4 provides an advanced importing feature that lets you upload a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, custom registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Venue Management. The venue manager in EE 4 allows information about venues to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform visitors of your event’s location. The venue profile displays many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays venue details like venue capacity, venue web address, venue phone number, venue location details, Google map, etc. You can also display venues on specific locations in your theme as well as on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a given venue.
- Automatic Software Upgrades. Event Espresso offers simple 1-click upgrading to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your software 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 media sharing buttons.
- Accurate Participant Management. You have control of your customers’ details; who has enrolled, which event they have booked and what amount they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your clients on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over your event page content and how your information displays to your prospects.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers when troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their web 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 objectives, 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 version of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes participant data in notification emails and updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an amazing number of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to further expand the capabilities of the event management process.
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 the event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events 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 the event thumbnail instead of the date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your event lists in a number of visually exciting ways.
- 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 ideal 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 directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your potential customers the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their cart. With the Multi-Event Registration add on, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp addon lets you automatically register participants to a chosen autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”It’s been very comprehensive and covers exactly the aspects of event registration that we needed for our site plus some features that we didn’t even need but could still use in the future. Very Excellent Plugin!” Tristan Hall, Area 12:2 Youth Group
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”You guys have done an AWESOME job with this system…promise me to keep up the excellent work you guys are doing, for as long as you can… Respect!” Robert Jarnroth, Jarnroth Digital Productions
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, show promoter, or event management professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the forums for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management workflow and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as many of its satisfied customers attest:
”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 plugin provides exceptional support including access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to manage your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This option enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This option enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one 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. Currently, the software is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Plugin For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your specific use-case, or to report issues and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you currently run events that involve managing dates and venues, registering attendees, and selling seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration Software
***