Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need managing registrations, such as seminars, group classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, networking conferences, or even a large-scale event like a music concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings is a time-consuming process. You need to co-ordinate event schedules, available dates and seating, participant numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce similar events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can easily install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up multiple events and start receiving registrations in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize your event registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity 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 improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling participants to perform the registration by themselves.
Allowing your clients to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you concentrate more resources on creating a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost 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 buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add-ons only if you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online bookings 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process is kept wholly online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information obtained from your event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to end-users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that users can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique features to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to set up as many types of tickets as you need and set different prices, ticket quantity limits, etc.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and components, and HTML and/or CSS.
- Tax Admin And Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you several ways to handle taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fee components to customers who purchase tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and display contact information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the risk of spamming and bots making fake registrations by using reCAPTCHA features that authenticate human activity.
- Promotional Codes. Offer promotional and discount codes to incentivize prospects to register immediately, or simply make your offerings more appealing for price-sensitive prospects. Also useful for helping to sell out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how you have done business with your customers. Your Contact Profile section stores the name, biography, contact details, event registration details, comments, etc. about each client.
- No-Ticket Events. You can create events without making it necessary for participants to select tickets. Use Event Espresso for any form of event, not just those that require tickets.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record comments about contacts on their profile and how you have helped them. Private commenting helps you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you’ve interacted with them.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events enable you to build an event over time without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to go live, or schedule to publish your event at a future time and date.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso can be set up in over 15 languages, and more translations are being added all the time.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- Register Multiple Participants. EE 4 allows an individual or people to purchase multiple tickets and different types of tickets at once. You decide how many people are allowed to enrol in a single registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Software Updates. Event Espresso provides easy 1-click upgrading to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential participants who have not paid in full for their admission with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the amount they owe, and include a link to the event details, a payment url and a url where they can download a PDF invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can also customize your templates to display events in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows developers to have more control and options over your events and how the information displays to readers.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data which can be useful for web developers who are potential software problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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 mission, the software has been built using 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 provides you with 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including customer data in emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Add-Ons
As well as an amazing array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow you to significantly expand the functionality of the event management process.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Grid Template Addon: 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 available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name shows the events associated with that category and closes any 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 Addon: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your event lists in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Addon: 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 allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add-on lets you manage the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives your potential customers 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 shopping 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.
- Events Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories in a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Addon: The new Event Espresso JSON API add-on enables other software applications, web tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
User Testimonials
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that users have written about Event Espresso:
“It is a very, very slick plugin. It’s one of those plugins where you install it, change a couple of settings, and boom you’re selling tickets.” Brad Williams, WebDevStudios
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, show promoter, or event professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the forums for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its end-users confirm:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
Event Espresso provides robust support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 and manage your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This lets you run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This edition enables you to run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
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 plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about issues and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP website owners.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run events that require 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 software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
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