Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings or registrations, such as seminars, group courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, corporate conferences, or even a large-scale event such as an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a time-consuming process. You will probably have to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, attendee numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily reproduce repeat events, give you more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be very costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based site, you can set up an inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule an event and start accepting online registrations in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing software.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into an automated and fully featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for event participants to perform the sign-up process by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you direct more of your attention on creating a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service. This is made possible by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add ons only if you need new functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event sign-ups 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with friends who may be interested.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process is performed wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data acquired from event participants.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its customers via built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great features to site owners. Here are just some:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure as many kinds of tickets as you want and set prices, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Customers can easily see your events and add these to their schedule using the calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to prospects and let them purchase the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display events data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing for your default ticket.
- Discount Codes. Leverage promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage visitors to make a purchasing decision now, or make your offers more attractive for price-sensitive prospects. Also useful for helping to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you understand who your clients are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can participate in your events.
- RSS Event Feeds. Keep your customers up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events enable you to develop your event over multiple sessions without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your event until you are ready to go live, or schedule your event pages to publish at a later date and time.
- Multi-Language Plugin. Event Espresso can be run in over 15 languages, and more languages are being added all the time.
- Exportable Data. You can output all the information gathered from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for producing advanced reports, planning marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Register Multiple Participants. EE 4 allows an individual or people to register multiple participants at the same time. You specify how many attendees are able to enroll in one registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage your customer’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily within reach.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential clients who have not made payment for their enrollment with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click. Your invoices will address registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount owing, and include a link to the event, a payment url and a url to download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Participant Management. You have control of your customers’ date; who has registered, for what event and what amount they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of event attendees to a spreadsheet for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your registrants on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are 100% compatible with WordPress.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reorganize the user interface to suit your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from the page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their website, 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 model 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 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes registrant data in notification emails and updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to significantly expand the functionality of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 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 an event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management add-on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can create as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Addon: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to display an event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add on: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your attendees 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 event lists in a range of visually exciting 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 ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to each seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives potential attendees the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their cart. With the Multiple 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 Table Template Add on: The Events Table Template add-on gives you an easy-to-use system that lets you edit the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also lets web developers build their own custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp addon lets you auto-register participants to a specific mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Plugin Users – Feedback
Here are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
”I have to say that it has been the right choice for me…I’ve been extremely pleased with the way my site is working.” Robin, RobinTime
”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, trainer, concert promoter, or event management consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the forums for new ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process and enhance the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as many of its satisfied plugin users confirm:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
The Event Espresso software provides exceptional support that includes 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 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 solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to manage your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you may want to consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This enables you to run Event Espresso on five domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’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 your specific situation, or to report problems and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of event promoters.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you currently run any event that requires managing dates and venues, booking participants, and reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
***
