Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as workshops, community classes, non-profit fund raisers, marketing events, or even a large-scale event such as a festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings is a time-consuming process. You may have to manage scheduling, date availability, participant numbers, data collection and storage, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily reproduce repeat events, give event managers more control, create a better client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can easily install an inexpensive and highly professional online event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily schedule multiple events and begin processing bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can employ various event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
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Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated 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 emails, to attendee limits, multiple price 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 literally eliminating the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for participants to perform the registration on their own.
Allowing your attendees to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you direct more of your attention on organizing a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a 3rd-party provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add-ons only when you need additional features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new sign-ups outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process remains entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information acquired from your event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its users via standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you collect unique information using a custom event registration form on your site to plan a great experience for your customers.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. You can customize your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and components, and HTML and/or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to prospective registrants so they can choose the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows event managers to configure the display settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Create events fast with pre-configured default pricing.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 includes 3 built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached the maximum number of registrants. You can also make it a requirement waiting list registrants pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- Private Contact Comments. Keep observations about users on their profile and how you’ve interacted with your contacts. Private notes enables you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve interacted with them.
- Draft Events. Draft events enable you to build your event over multiple sessions without publishing it to your website. You can work on your event until you are ready to publish it on your site, or schedule your event to publish at a future date and time.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of every aspect of your event’s registration and ticketing, and also allows you to automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event page designs, payment processing and handling, list waiting, limits on attendees, printable tickets and more.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating similar tickets for your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for all new events simply by checking a box.
- WP Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WP WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily insert images and create your content without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any WP post or page.
- Registrant Records. Manage your customer’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
- Staff Management. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as staff member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in your event description.
- Attendee Reports. Event reports provides you with information of your registrations and transactions, allowing you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue you’ve collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over the content of your events and how your information displays to prospective customers.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data that can be useful for web developers who are potential application problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: 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 objectives, the company operates on a modular and efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the need to re-enter event details when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service fee to each ticket).
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a comprehensive range of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to significantly enhance the functionality of the event management system.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display all scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add-on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search for events that occur in a certain date range.
- 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.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your event lists in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add on is suitable 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 lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to each seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing add-on adds the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the capacity 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 venue door. Customers 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.
- Events Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to 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 developers design custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Here are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”I’m so excited to fire Eventbrite! Event Espresso has an amazing WP plugin for event management. We’re testing it now & are very impressed! In a nutshell Event Espresso saves us money & does everything Eventbrite did before. :)” Dustin Nay
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, conference promoter, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, search the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management process or improve the experience of your registrants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive end-user support, as many of its plugin clients attest:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
The plugin provides incredible support including access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, custom development 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons 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 specials being offered. Presently, the plugin retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration Plugin For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
Event Espresso regularly adds 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 tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about problems and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress website and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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