Do you currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings, such as workshops, group courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, marketing functions, or even a big event like a trade exhibit, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event bookings is a complex process. You will probably have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, availability, registration numbers, data entry, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and 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 lower expenses, help you easily reproduce previous events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer 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 professional web-based event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create multiple events and start processing online bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing applications.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as it is being revamped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin 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 existing web site into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are enabling event attendees to enroll on their own.
Letting your participants to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more of your time on planning a more enjoyable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a 3rd-party service provider. This is made possible through a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add-ons when you need additional features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event bookings outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social add ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite others who may be interested.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process is completed wholly online, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the data acquired from your event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to its customers through standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you collect unique data using a custom event registration form on your website to plan a customized experience for your users.
- Custom Notification Emails. Easily set up automated registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with your clients.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect booking payments before running the events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse venue information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the likelihood of spammers and robots creating false registrations on your website by using reCAPTCHA settings to provide human validation.
- Promotional Codes. Offer promotional and discount codes to encourage people to make a buying decision without delaying, or simply make your offerings more attractive for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical for helping to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of attendees and check in those who have attended.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and cannot register for your events.
- Private Contact Notes. Keep observations about users on their profile. Private commenting helps you keep a record of when event attendees contacted you, your internal comments, and how you’ve helped them.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you develop an event over multiple sessions without displaying it live on your site. You can work on your events until you are ready to publish it to your site, or schedule your event page to publish at a future date and time.
- Multi-Language Plugin. Event Espresso is being translated into more than 15 languages, with more translations coming soon.
- Bulk Edit Event Data. EE 4 provides an advanced importing feature that lets you quickly upload a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, ticketing information, pricing, custom registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or people to book multiple attendees simultaneously. You decide how many attendees are allowed to enroll in one session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Attendee Records. Manage each customer’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Team Member Manager. Save time and keep your business organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in an event description.
- Transaction Reports. Event reporting gives you information of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue you’ve collected.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 facilitates more complex extensions and customizations to the application.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reconfigure the user interface to suit your workflow processes. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely removed from your page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value: According to the philosophy stated on their web site, Event Espresso’s objective 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 in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to significantly expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display all scheduled events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Addon: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your event lists in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon is suitable for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to each seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration addon gives potential customers the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing registrants will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their cart. With the Multiple Event Registration add on, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- Events Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events via an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Addon: The new Event Espresso JSON API addon permits other applications, web tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso rocks! I use it for my dance class registrations. Unlike most dance studios where people have to call or send an email in advance, Event Espresso puts a registration form right there in front of the user and allows me to collect valuable information from the user during the registration process with custom questions such as “Do you have previous dance experience?” or “How did you hear about us?”. It also gives my site a professional look and feel.” Ral, Ral’eau Salsa Dance Company
”When you can get a company to expend more money switching systems just to use your plugin…you’ve really accomplished something.” David, House of Prayer
”Just bought an Event Espresso license for an upcoming conference website we are working on. The custom registration forms functionality rocks!” Eric Sopp, Inside Design
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, show planner, or event professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the forums for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your registrants.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its users confirm:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
The Event Espresso software provides incredible support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you need to consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This license option allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This edition enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online 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 your particular use-case, or to report problems and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of event managers.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run events that require managing dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and/or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
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