Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings, such as workshops, group courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, corporate events, or even a big event like a trade exhibit, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings is a complex and time-consuming process. You have to co-ordinate event schedules, availability, registration numbers, data processing and storage, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate previously-run events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can set up a very inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily schedule multiple events and begin processing registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online event bookings 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 event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using the plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the 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 existing website into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to enroll themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more of your attention on delivering a better event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party provider. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy optional addons when you need additional features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online signups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with others who may also be interested.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process remains entirely online, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information acquired from your event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to users via built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great features to WP users. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Custom Notification Emails. Easily set up automated booking and payment confirmation emails to communicate with your participants.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 gives you several ways to administer taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to registrants who purchase tickets. You can administer taxes globally or on a ticket-by-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 duplicate the primary registrant’s information for any added participants.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the base ticket price for your default ticket.
- Promotional Codes. You can leverage promotion and discount codes to encourage visitors to register immediately, or simply make your events more affordable for price-sensitive prospects. Also useful for helping to sell-out events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event attendees when they show up, or send in paper forms for manual processing later.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can register for your events.
- RSS Event Feeds. Keep your customers updated about your events, drive quality traffic and expand your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build an event page over multiple work sessions without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to publish it to your website, or schedule to publish your event at a later time and date.
- Complete Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing, and also lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, custom event designs, payment processing, wait lists, limits on attendees, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Exportable Data. You can output all the information collected from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for producing advanced reports, devising new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WP Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert images and write your event descriptions without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post.
- Attendee Records. You can manage your attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized and easily within reach.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your website visitors can help increase exposure for your event using social 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 event information in your own custom way.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for non-technical users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 allows for more complex extensions and customizations to the application.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers when potential errors.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: According to the philosophy stated on their web site, Event Espresso’s aim 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 in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the work of re-entering event information when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to each ticket).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to further enhance the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display your upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add on is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site can have access to your special events. Members can also store personal data into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also look up past events and make payment for events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart addon is 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 site. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives potential attendees the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing registrants will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their shopping 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This add on uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories via a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on lets you auto-register participants to a selected mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
User Testimonials
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
“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
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, workshop planner, or event management consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the support forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Product Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as so many of its satisfied plugin users attest:
”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 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to organize and manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you may want to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This license option enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This allows you to install Event Espresso on five sites. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons 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 special offers. Presently, the software sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Information
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 plugin’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to report problems and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP users.
If you own a WordPress website and you currently run an event that involves scheduling dates, times and venues, booking attendees, or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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