Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as seminars, community classes, charity fund-raisers, networking conferences, or even a big event like a music show, 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 complex and time-consuming process. You may need to co-ordinate event schedules, available dates and seating allocations, attendee numbers, data administration, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for similar events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered web site, you can download and install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily schedule your event and begin processing bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
Learn more here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing 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 improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for participants to register themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you focus more of your resources on delivering a more unique 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 participants to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso gives you an inexpensive 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 you start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add ons only if you need new functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event bookings 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing addons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can remain entirely online, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data acquired from your event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users via built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast 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 many dates and times (called datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Easily configure automatic booking and payment confirmation emails to communicate with event customers.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospective registrants so they can choose the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse venue information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly by pre-configuring default prices.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track your attendees.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how they have done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can join a waiting list if your event has become completely sold out. Additionally, you can make it a requirement wait-listed registrants pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- XML RSS Event Feeds. Automatically update your users, drive quality traffic and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- SEO Friendly Page URLs. Keyword rich URLs leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly urls that have relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you drive more traffic to your site.
- Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used for events, including currency name, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for your events, you can easily set up as your default ticket for all new events simply by checking a box.
- Venue Management. The venue manager in EE 4 lets information about a venue to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform potential participants of the location of your event. The venue profile has many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you reuse venue information like venue capacity, venue site URL, telephone number, venue address, location map, etc. You can also list venues on specific locations on your WordPress theme as well as on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a given venue.
- One-Click Software Upgrades. Event Espresso offers simple 1-click software updating to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your software installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Staff Manager. Save time and keep your business organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have multiple event types like free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different kinds of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize them to make it easier for event participants to locate what they’re looking for. You can display all the events in a category on an event category page, make all events searchable by category, and color-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, as well as suggesting other events in the categories that interest your visitors.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are 100% compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Metabox Management And Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely deleted from the page.
- 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 that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service tax to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Addons
As well as an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to significantly expand the functionality of the event management process.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template displays categories as a simple list. Clicking on a category name displays all events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Events Social Sharing Add-on: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your event lists in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: This add on lets you involve others in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others to help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts 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 Addon: The Ticketing add on adds the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at the door. Customers can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events via an attractive graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin addon, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track registrations, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Here are a few of the many testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, concert planner, or event consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, spend a little time researching the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its plugin clients attest:
”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
The software provides exceptional support including access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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 a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you should consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This option allows you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license option allows you to configure Event Espresso on five domains. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration System For WordPress
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 author when you visit the website.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress website and you intend to run events that involve scheduling dates, times and venues, registering attendees, and/or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
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