Do you currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings, such as workshops, group classes, not-for-profit fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event like a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You will probably need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data entry, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can download and install an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create your event and begin processing registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been redeveloped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
Learn more here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits 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 current website into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling attendees to register by themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more energy on planning a more unique event.
Full 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 participants to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible through a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase addons only if you need extra functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event bookings 24 hrs a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can be completed entirely in digital form, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you collect from your event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to end-users through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to web site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
- Custom Notification Emails. Configure automatic registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with event clients.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants and let them purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary registrant’s details for any added participants.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the default ticket price of the system-default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you’ve done business with your clients. Your Contact Profile page stores the name, biography, contact information, event registration history, private comments, and more about each customer.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Control who can participate in your events.
- Event RSS Feeds. Keep your users updated about your events, bring in more visitors and expand your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Latest Version Of WordPress. The EE 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build visually attractive event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Complete Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing, and also allows you to automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, customizable event designs, payment processing, wait lists, limits on attendees, print-ready tickets and more.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for most of your events, you can set up as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by checking a box.
- Multiple Attendee Enrollments. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or a group to enroll multiple participants at the same time. Event managers decide how many attendees are able to enrol in a single registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you interact with an expert community of event managers and other plugin users. You can network with other Event Espresso users using their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential participants who have not fully paid for their registration with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click. Your invoices will address registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount they owe, and include a link to the event information, a payment url and a link to download a PDF invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize the page templates to display event information in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over the content of your events and how the information displays to site visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for normal website traffic whenever you need to perform maintenance on your website. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: 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 objectives, the company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service fee to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a very large range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to further enhance the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- EE4 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 the event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events manager addon allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can schedule as many events in the future as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template displays categories in a simple list. Clicking a category name shows all events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website will have access to your special events. Members can also input personal data into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also view previous events and pay for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Versions: This add-on lets you involve your staff in the event management process and give new users the ability 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, 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 WP dashboard and/or certain areas 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.
- Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add on adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. Registrants 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add-on: This addon uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events using a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp add-on allows you to automatically register attendees to a specific mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are 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
“I just completed my first event using Event Espresso. I really believe without Event Espresso my event would not have been the success it was.” Cathy Earle, Women Only Weekend
”I am in love with your product, I work with many educational institutions that hold classes/events and I will definitely recommend this to all of them, the only time I have seen a system this comprehensive and sophisticated is when an organization I worked with paid a programmer nearly $8,000 for a custom solution, and yet still there are features in your registration system that his didn’t have. Thank you so much for your help and patience.” Abdullah J.
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, show planner, or event management consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the user forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management workflow or improve the experience of your event customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent technical support, as so many of its satisfied customers attest:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to run your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider using one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This option lets you set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This option enables you to set up Event Espresso on five domains. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP site owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues, registering attendees, or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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