Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings, such as workshops, group courses, non-profit fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a big event like an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will probably have to manage scheduling, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data collection, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce repeat events, give you more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based website, you can set up an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily schedule an event and begin receiving online bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans 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.
Go here to learn more:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are facilitating participants to complete the sign-up process themselves.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you spend more of your resources on planning a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a third party service. This is made possible through a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add ons when you need additional features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event sign-ups outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may also be interested.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process is performed wholly online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information gathered from your event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of built-in to website owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from one single event.
- Custom Notification Emails. Easily configure custom automated registration and payment notification emails to communicate with event registrants.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides several ways to handle taxes for an event and report tax fee components to customers who purchase tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows event managers to customize the look and control settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the likelihood of spammers and bots making bogus registrations on your website with reCAPTCHA settings to provide human validation.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event attendees and check-in everyone who has attended.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event is full. You can also make it a requirement wait-list members pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- RSS Event Feeds. Provide automatic updates to your website readers, bring in more visitors and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Most Recent WP Version. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build visually attractive event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used in your events, including currency name, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Exportable Information. You can export all the data gathered from event participants into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, devising marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Venue Manager. The venue manager in EE 4 allows information about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform registrants of the location of your event. The venue record displays many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes information like venue seating capacity, venue website, venue phone number, venue location details, Google map, etc. You can also display all of your venues throughout different parts on your theme as well as on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a given venue.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you interact with a community of experienced event managers, developers, designers, marketers and business owners who also use the plugin. You can interact with other Event Espresso users using their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your website visitors can tell others about your event using social media sharing buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize your templates to display events in your own custom way.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are fully compatible with WordPress.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for developers when potential application errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their 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 as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes participant data in emails and email newsletters.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service tax to tickets).
- Default payment status.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to significantly enhance the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display upcoming events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events manager add-on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can add as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of your recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays categories as a simple list. Clicking on a category name displays the events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- 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 events in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart addon is suitable 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 allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you manage the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to every seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at the venue door. People 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 Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events in a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on lets you automatically register participants to a particular autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have written 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
”When you can get a company to expend more money switching systems just to use your plugin…you’ve really accomplished something.” David, House of Prayer
”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.
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, festival promoter, or event professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the user forum for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management process and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Product Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as many of its end-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 incredible support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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 WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to run your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This enables you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional 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.
Use the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to notify developers about bugs and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run any event that involves managing dates and venues, registering participants, and/or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
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