Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community classes, non-profit fund-raisers, corporate conferences, or even a big event such as a trade exhibit, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event bookings can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You may need to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, registration numbers, data entry, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily reproduce previous events, give you more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can download and install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule an event and start processing registrations in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and autoresponders.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it is being redeveloped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform 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 features of using this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling event attendees to perform the sign-up process by themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you direct more of your energy on delivering a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service. This is made possible by using a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add-ons when you need new functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online registrations 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with other people they know who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process can be conducted wholly online, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data collected from your event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to users through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that users can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can gather unique data using custom event registration forms on your site to plan a unique experience for your attendees.
- Event Calendar. Customers can easily find your events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to prospective attendees and let them choose the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary attendee’s registration information for any additional registrants.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the likelihood of spamming and bots making fake registrations on your website with reCAPTCHA option to provide human authentication.
- Discount Codes. Provide promotion and discount codes to encourage visitors to take action without delays, or make your offers more affordable for others. Also useful if you want to sell-out events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to know who your customers are and how they have done business with you.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Control who can and can’t attend your events.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential registrants to interact with you online via commenting and past participants to post reviews that can help others choose whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for comments are configured via the WordPress default commenting system.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events enable you to build an event page over multiple work sessions without publishing it to your website. You can keep working on your event pages until you are ready to publish it to your site, or schedule to publish your event pages at a future time and date.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of all aspects of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and lets you automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, customizable event designs, payment processing, wait lists, attendee limits, print-ready tickets and more.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating similar tickets for your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by checking a box.
- Register Multiple Event Attendees. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or an organization to order multiple tickets and different types of tickets at once. Event managers control how many attendees can enrol in a single session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Registrant Records. You can manage your attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Staff Member Management. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Attendee Reporting. Event reporting provides you with data of your registrations and transactions, allowing you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue you have collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over your content and how the information displays to your prospects.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data that can be useful for developers when troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy 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 company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including participant data in notification emails and email updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow software users to further expand the functionality of the event management system.
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 an event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to browse for events that take place within a certain date range.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add-on lets you display your event lists in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Versions: This add on lets you include staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission 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 capabilities, so your staff can help you manage your events or 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 sections of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration addon gives potential attendees the ability to book 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 Multi-Event Registration addon, 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 WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using an attractive 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 details through an Application Programming Interface (API).
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 addons, visit the plugin website:
User Testimonials
Here are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Thanks to you and the rest of the team for Event Espresso – Every time I get a signup for an event, I think about how much time EE saves me – and signups happen while I’m out on the water teaching kayaking, not answering the phone. :-)” Tue Brems Olesen, OnAdventure
”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
”I played around with the free version for a couple hours then purchased the Pro for a client. Love it and so do they! Sweetest Event plugin I have tried.” Bill Chambers, Bill Chambers Design
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, workshop planner, or event management consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, visit the user forum for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow or improve the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and WP themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as many of its satisfied users confirm:
”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
Event Espresso provides robust support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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 an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This license option lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license enables you to install Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Price details 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: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
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.
Search the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific use-case, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For detailed 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 are a WordPress user and you currently run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues, enrolling attendees, and/or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration Software
***