Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community classes, non-profit fundraisers, corporate functions, or even a large-scale event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You may be required to co-ordinate event schedules, date availability, registration numbers, data collection and storage, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event participants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate recurring events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can easily install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily schedule an event and start accepting bookings literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments 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 an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as it is being redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using the plugin.
For more details go here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating event participants to enrol themselves.
Allowing your customers to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you concentrate more attention on creating a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service. This is made possible through a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add-ons when you need additional features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new sign-ups 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can remain entirely in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data you obtain from your event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to end-users via standard features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to WP users. Here are just some:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), and these can be managed from one single event.
- Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. Match your site’s design for your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s template options and elements, and HTML and/or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants and let them purchase the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary registrant’s details for any added registrants.
- Default Prices. Create events fast with pre-configured system-default ticket prices.
- Discount Codes. Leverage promotion and multiple discount codes to incentivize visitors to register now, or simply make your offers more affordable for price-sensitive prospects. Also useful for helping to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to know who your clients are and how you’ve done business with them. The Contact Profile section stores the name, biography, contact information, event registration history, private comments, and more about each customer.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can register for your events.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record notes about users on their profile. Private commenting allows you to keep records of when event attendees contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve helped them.
- Works With The Most Up-To-Date Version Of WordPress. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build beautiful event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing, and allows you to automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event designs, payment processing, wait lists, limits on attendees, printable tickets and more.
- Exportable Information. You can output all of your information gathered from event customers into Excel or CSV format for producing advanced reports, devising new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Multiple Attendee Enrollments. EE 4 allows an individual or a group to register multiple participants at the same time. You control how many people are able to enroll in a single registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Software Installation Upgrading. Event Espresso provides simple one-click plugin installation updates to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Staff Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Transaction Reporting. Event reporting gives you information of all of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money you have collected.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for most users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 facilitates more complex developments and customizations to the application.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for developers who are troubleshooting.
- 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 mission, the software has been built using 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 over 40 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to significantly expand the functionality of the event management process.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display upcoming events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with multiple datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template displays the categories in a simple list. Clicking a category name displays the events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your web 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 add-on allows you to take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered website users can have access to your special events. Members can also input personal details into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also view past events and make payment for events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart addon is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add-on lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to every seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the ability to generate 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 handling check-in scans at the door. 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events via a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on allows you to automatically register attendees to a specific autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Plugin Users – Feedback
Here are some of the testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:
”I want to commend you on a fabulous product which is just the right price for a small non-profit. People are happy with the registration process, as are we! …Thank you SO much for a great product.” Sandra Forero Bush, World Trade Center Tacoma
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
“Love the plugin, we only use it once a year for a race we have in February. This saved us tons of time in data entry. In addition, we had more runners register than any other year. We attribute that to the ease of registering online. Thanks for your work.” Ed, Friends of Oscar Scherer Park
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, concert promoter, or event management professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process or improve the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as many of its satisfied plugin end-users confirm:
”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 with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to run your events.
Product Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This edition allows you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This edition lets you install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration System 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 site.
Additional Info
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 documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a specific use-case, or to report problems and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of WP users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues, booking attendees, or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Software
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