Do you currently run or plan to run events that require bookings or registrations, such as seminars, training classes, charity fund raisers, corporate functions, or even a large-scale event like a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a complex process. You may be required to co-ordinate event schedules, event dates, attendee numbers, data processing, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event attendees.
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 duplicate recurring events, give you more control, improve customer 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 own a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can easily install an inexpensive and highly professional online event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up an event and start accepting bookings in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can employ various event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket sales, to creating 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 software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the software is being revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth and 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 this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website into a feature-rich and professional 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 seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating event participants to register on their own.
Letting your customers to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more of your attention on delivering a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party provider. This is made possible by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy optional addons only if you need extra features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online signups outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite their friends who may also be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process can be performed entirely online, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information you obtain from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great built-in to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you set up as many kinds of tickets as you need and specify separate pricing options, number of tickets, and more.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Easily configure custom automatic booking and payment notification emails to communicate with event clients.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants so they can choose the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to configure the display settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly and easily with pre-configured default prices.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 includes three comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you know who your clients are and how you have done business with them. Your Contact Profile section stores the name, biography, contact information, event registration details, private comments, and more about each registrant.
- No-Ticket Events. Set up events without making it necessary for attendees to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any type of event, not just when tickets are required.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Record comments about contacts on their profile and how you have interacted with your contacts. Private notes lets you keep records of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve helped them.
- Works With The Latest Version Of WP. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build beautiful event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in full control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing, and lets you automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event designs, payment processing, list waiting, limits on attendees, printable ticketing and more.
- Exportable Information. You can output all the data collected from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for producing advanced reports, implementing new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue manager in EE 4 allows information about venues to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue record displays many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes details such as venue capacity, venue website, venue phone number, venue address, maps, etc. You can also display venue profiles throughout different areas on your theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a particular venue.
- Registrant Records. You can manage your customer’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily accessible.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and website visitors can help create a wider exposure for your event using social sharing buttons.
- Attendee Reporting. Event reports provides you with information of all registrations and transactions, allowing you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue you’ve collected.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for non-technical users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), Event Espresso 4 permits more complex enhancements and customizations to the software.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registrations for normal site visitors whenever website maintenance is needed. You can continue to work on your content 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 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 version of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – simplifies the work of re-entering event details when adding new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Add-Ons
As well as an amazing array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow plugin users to further expand the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display upcoming events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add-on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings 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 within a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Add-on: This add on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files addon allows you to override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Versions: This add-on lets you involve other users in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers permission 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 others can help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections 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 Addon: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Attendees 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 Template Addon: The Events Table Template addon gives you a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to edit the look and feel of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also enables developers to design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track registrations, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted 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
”Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer, Improve Photography
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, workshop promoter, or event consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your event customers.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as many of its plugin customers attest:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
Event Espresso provides great support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you should consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This option allows you to install 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 license option allows you to set up 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 lets you install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin is being retailed for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
Note: The pricing above was current 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 Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to report bugs and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of WordPress website owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run any event that involves scheduling dates, times and venues, registering participants, or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a better WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Software
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