Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as workshops, community classes, charity fund raisers, social conferences, or even a big event such as an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complex process. You may need to manage scheduling, availability, attendee numbers, data entry, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate repeat events, give you more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily create your event and start accepting online bookings literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been rebuilt 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 price. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling event participants to perform the registration by themselves.
Allowing your clients to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you focus more time on delivering a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a third party provider. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add-ons when you need added features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online sign-ups 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with other people they know who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process can be conducted wholly in digital form, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data you collect from event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great features to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Ready to start using in very little time.
- Custom Event Registration Forms. With Event Espresso you can gather specific data using a custom event registration form on your site to plan a customized experience for your event participants.
- Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule using a WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect money prior to running events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and display attendee information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the chance of spamming and bots making false registrations on your site by using reCAPTCHA option to provide human authentication.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event participants at the door, or send in paper registration forms for manual processing later.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and can’t register for your events.
- Private Contact Commenting. Keep observations about event registrants on their profile. Private commenting enables you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve interacted with them.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you build your event page at your own pace without publishing it to your site. You can continue working on your event until you are ready to go live, or schedule your event page to publish at a future date and time.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is currently available in 15+ languages, with more translations coming soon.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for most of your events, you can easily set up as your default ticket for your new events simply by checking a box.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WordPress Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily insert graphic images and create and edit your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any typical WordPress post or page.
- Automatic Updates. Event Espresso provides easy 1-click plugin upgrading to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your plugin installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event attendees who have not paid yet for their enrollment with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with just one click. Your invoices will address registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount they owe, and include links to the event details, a payment link and a url where they can download a PDF invoice.
- Transaction Reporting. Event reporting provides you with information of all the registrations and transactions, allowing you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue you have collected.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows web developers to have more control and options over your event page content and how your information displays to visitors.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for web developers who are diagnosing application problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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 in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – simplifies the work of re-entering event information when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow plugin users to further enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add-on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can also be customized to show an event thumbnail instead of the date.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site can have access to these special events. Members can also enter personal details into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Users can also view event history and make payment for events.
- 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 from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration addon 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 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 via a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add-on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track bookings, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
User Testimonials
Below are just some of the testimonials that 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
”Customizing an Event Registration plugin for WordPress by @EventEspresso. Love the pro version. Highly Recommended!” Joshua Garity
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, show planner, or event management professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management process or enhance the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its end-users attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides exceptional support with access to a support forum, in-depth 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to manage your events.
Product Pricing
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 software features, however, you may want to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This edition allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you run Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing 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 Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Information
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.
Look up the plugin’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to report errors and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP website owners.
If you own a WordPress website and you plan to run an event that requires managing dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
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