Do you currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings, such as workshops, training classes, charity fund-raisers, marketing events, or even a large-scale event like a trade show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complex and time-consuming process. You will probably need to manage calendar schedules, event dates, attendee numbers, data processing, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate previous events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can set up an inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up an event and begin accepting registrations in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels 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 practically eliminating the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for attendees to perform the registration themselves.
Allowing your clients to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you invest more resources on delivering a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a third-party service. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy add-ons only if you need new functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event registrations 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and addons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process can be completed entirely online, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information obtained from your event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to its customers through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to website owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you collect specific information using custom event registration forms on your site to create a customized experience for your attendees.
- Custom Notification Email Message. Configure automatic registration and payment notification emails to communicate with event attendees.
- Tax Admin And Reporting. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of ways to administer taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants who purchase tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows event managers to configure the display settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the risk of spamming and bots making bogus registrations on your web site with reCAPTCHA tools to authenticate human activity.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track your attendees.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event attendees when they show up, or send in paper registration forms for manual registration later.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is sold out. You can also make it a requirement waiting list registrants pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Event RSS Feeds. Provide automatic updates to your users, drive quality traffic and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Search Engine Friendly Event Page Web Links. Keyword rich URLs take advantage of your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” permalinks that include topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your events.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of all aspects of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and also lets you automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event page designs, payment processing, list waiting, limits on attendees, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your information collected from your event participants into Excel or CSV format for compiling reports, implementing new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Venue Manager. The venue management feature in Event Espresso 4 allows details about venues to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue record displays many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue information like venue seating capacity, venue website, venue phone number, venue address, location map, etc. You can also list venue profiles throughout various areas of your theme and on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a particular venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you engage with a community of experienced event managers, developers, web designers, web marketers and businesses who also use the plugin. You can interact with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and website visitors can help increase exposure for your event using social media sharing buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have multiple event types such as free and paid, workshops and mastermind sessions, different types of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize them to help your attendees to locate what they’re looking for. You can list all the events in a category on an event category page, make events searchable by category, and color-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, as well as suggesting other events in the categories that appeal to your visitors.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows developers to have more control and options over your event page content and how the information displays to visitors.
- Metabox Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which brings the ability to reorganize the user interface to match your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: Event Espresso states on their website that their mission 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 software has been built using a modular and 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 provides you with over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the functionality of events.
Some of these addons include:
- 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 the event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
- 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 in advance. You can schedule as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to browse for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: This add-on adds 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 registration.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your events in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add on 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 lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing addon gives you the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template addon gives event managers a simple and 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 enables developers to design custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- JSON API Add-on: The new Event Espresso JSON API addon gives permission for other software applications, online tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
User Testimonials
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, conference planner, or event consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time researching the user forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow or improve the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WP plugins and WP themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as many of its end-users attest:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
Event Espresso provides amazing support with access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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 developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This allows you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This lets you run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of WordPress site owners.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you intend to run an event that involves managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, and/or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
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