Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, social functions, or even a large-scale event such as a music festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You have to manage scheduling, availability, registration numbers, data processing and storage, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to attendees.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce previously-run events, give you more control, create a better client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website, you can set up an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin allows you to easily set up your event and begin processing online bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the software is being revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features 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:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even 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 literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event participants to enrol on their own.
Letting your customers to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you spend more time on creating a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin 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 to a minimum through a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase addons only when you need new features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online registrations outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite friends who may also be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process can be conducted wholly in digital form, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data acquired from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to users via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique features to web site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Custom Notification Emails. Easily configure customized automatic registration and payment notification email messages to communicate with your clients.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect booking payments prior to running events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and reuse attendee information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily by pre-configuring system-default ticket prices.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track all attendees.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you understand who your customers are and how they have done business with you.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Control who can and can’t register for your events.
- XML RSS Event Feeds. Automatically update users, bring in more visitors and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events enable you to develop your event page in your own timeframe without publishing it to your website. You can work on your event until you are ready to take it live, or schedule your event page to publish at a future date and time.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso can be run in more than 15 languages, and more languages are being added all the time.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for most of your events, you can automatically set up as your default ticket for all new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Event Venue Management. The venue manager feature in Event Espresso 4 lets information about a venue to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your website to inform registrants of the location of your event. The venue profile has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays venue details such as venue seating capacity, venue website, telephone number, venue location details, location map, etc. You can also list venues throughout various locations of your WordPress theme as well as on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a given venue.
- Attendee Records. You can manage each registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily accessible.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and website visitors can help increase exposure for your events using social sharing buttons.
- Attendee Reports. Quick-view event reports gives you information of all the registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money has been collected.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for general users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 facilitates more complex enhancements and customizations to the plugin.
- Metabox Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value: According to the philosophy stated on their web 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 modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a very large array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to further expand the functionality of the event management process.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 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 available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events manager add on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of your recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to search for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template addon is capable of displaying your event lists in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart addon 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 lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing add on gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon 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. Customers 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add on provides event managers with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to edit 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 lets web developers design their own custom templates using one of the templates provided as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp add-on lets you automatically register participants to a selected mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
Customers – Testimonials
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is so easy to use yet feature rich and stable. It is a cornerstone of our site and our success.” Fraser Barner, Speaker’s Lab
”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
”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, conference planner, or event consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time visiting the support forum for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP development rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its end-users 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
Event Espresso provides great support that includes access to support forums, in-depth 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.
Additionally, 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 run your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This option lets you configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license option allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 sites. 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 specials being offered. Currently, the plugin retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a specific use-case, or to report issues and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run an event that requires scheduling dates and venues, registering attendees, or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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