Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as workshops, community courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, corporate conferences, or even a large-scale event like a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complex process. You will probably have to co-ordinate scheduling, availability, registration numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for recurring events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can easily install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up multiple events and start accepting registrations in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been revamped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to register themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your energy on creating a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add-ons only when you need added features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event sign-ups outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with their friends who may be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process is performed entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Information. You own all the information you acquire from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to end-users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that users can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of features to website owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to set up as many types of tickets as you need and specify prices, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. You can customize your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and components, and HTML and/or CSS.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 gives you several options to administer taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fee components to customers when purchasing tickets. You can configure taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display venue details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let you create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of the default ticket.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track your attendees.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you’ve done business with your customers. Your Contact Profile section stores updated records like the name, biography, contact details, event registration details, comments, and more about each registrant.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. You can also specify that wait-listed registrants pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record notes about users on their profile and how you have interacted with them. Private commenting allows you to keep records of when event participants contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve assisted them.
- Draft Events. Draft events enable you to develop your event page in your own time-frame without displaying it live on your site. You can work on your events until you are ready to take things live, or schedule your event to publish at a later time and date.
- Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used when promoting events, such as currency name, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, etc.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating similar tickets for your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- WP Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WordPress WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert graphic images and create your event descriptions without having to know HTML or CSS, just like any typical WordPress post.
- Registrant Profiles. Manage your registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized and easily accessible.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your site visitors can help create a wider exposure for your event using social media sharing buttons.
- Accurate Event Participant Manager. You control your participants’ records; who has registered, which event they have booked and what amount they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to Excel for additional uses, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your clients individually or collectively.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for general users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 allows for more complex developments and customizations to the application.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for regular website visitors when site maintenance is required. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And 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 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 includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes customer data in emails and updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Addons
As well as a very large range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to further expand the functionality of events.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Grid Template Add-on: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If an event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can add as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- 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.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your website is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add on lets you display your event lists in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This add-on lets you include other staff in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and assign them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing addon adds the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon 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 venues. 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.
- Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add-on provides event managers with an 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 web developers design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- JSON API Addon: The new Event Espresso JSON API addon lets other software applications, web sites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
Customer Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied customers 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
”I have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival
”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 an education services provider, presenter, concert planner, or event management professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WP plugins and WP themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as many of its plugin users confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The software provides exceptional support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to run your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of 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 Licensing – This allows you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to report errors and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you plan to run an event that requires scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
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