Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating registrations, such as seminars, training classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, marketing conferences, or even a large-scale event like a trade exhibit, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a time-consuming process. You may be required to manage calendar schedules, availability, registration numbers, data processing, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to participants.
There are many benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate previous events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can install an inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily set up your event and start processing online bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Customize event registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing solutions.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it has been rebuilt using a different structure to enable future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into an automated and feature-rich event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating event participants to enroll themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your time on creating a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add ons when you need added features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event registrations outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can be transacted entirely online, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the data you collect from your event participants.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that customers can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from one single event.
- Customized Notification Email Message. Configure automated booking and payment notification email messages to communicate with event participants.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments prior to running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to customize the display settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Create events fast by pre-configuring default prices.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event attendees and check-in everyone who has attended.
- No Ticket Events. List events without making it necessary for attendees to select tickets. Use Event Espresso for any type of event, not just those that require tickets.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your events page by encouraging potential attendees to ask questions about your event and previous attendees to post reviews that can help others choose whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for public commenting are configured via the WordPress commenting settings.
- Keyword Rich URLs. Keyword-rich event page Web links leverage your WP Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” web links that use topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your site.
- Complete Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing, and also lets you automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, custom event designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, limits on attendees, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for most of your events, you can automatically set one of those tickets as your default ticket for all new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager in EE 4 lets information about venues to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your site to inform potential participants of your event’s location. The venue record displays many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue details such as venue capacity, venue website, telephone number, venue location details, map, etc. You can also display venue profiles on specific locations on your WP 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 all the events for a given venue.
- 1-Click Upgrades. Event Espresso provides simple one-click updating to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and site visitors can help create a wider exposure for your events using social media sharing buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can also customize the page templates to display events in your own custom way.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over your events and how the information displays to visitors.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reconfigure the user interface to match your workflow processes. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely deleted from your workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the mission statement 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 mission, the company operates on a model 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 over 40 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – simplifies the need to re-enter event information when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the functionality of events.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display your scheduled events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes multiple datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to search for events that occur within a certain date range.
- 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 Files Add-on: The Custom Files add on provides PHP files that let you override certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: This addon lets you include other users in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers permission to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and assign them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing addon adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the door. 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 View Template Add on: The Events Table Template add-on provides event managers with an 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 source template.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API add on lets other applications, web sites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso details through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
User Testimonials
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, seminar promoter, or event professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, spend a little time researching the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP development rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great customer support, as many of its users confirm:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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 WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you may want to consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This edition enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This option allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin is being retailed for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional 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.
Use the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to report errors and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of businesses.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run an event that involves scheduling dates, times and venues, enrolling participants, and/or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager System
***
