Do you currently run or plan to run events that require managing registrations, such as seminars, community classes, not-for-profit fund-raisers, marketing events, or even a big event such as an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complex and time-consuming process. You need to manage calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data administration, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event registrants.
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 reduce expenses, help you easily replicate recurring events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered site, you can install an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create an event and begin processing online registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older EE 3, as it has been revamped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into an automated and feature-rich event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are enabling event participants to enroll on their own.
Allowing your clients to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you focus more of your resources on delivering a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy optional add-ons when you need new features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new bookings 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may also be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can remain entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information acquired from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its customers via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Ready to use in no time.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you collect specific data using custom event registration forms on your web pages to plan a customized experience for your attendees.
- Customizable Event Designs. Customize your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and parts, as well as HTML or CSS.
- Tax Admin & Reporting. Event Espresso 4 gives you several options to manage taxes for an event and report tax fee components to customers when purchasing tickets. You can administer taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to configure the display settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of your default ticket.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track all attendees.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how they have done business with you.
- Ticketless Events. Create events without the requirement for attendees to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all forms of events, not just those that need tickets.
- RSS Feeds. Keep your website visitors up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and reach a wider number of prospects with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you develop your event page at your own pace without displaying it live on your site. You can continue developing your event pages until you are ready to publish it live on your website, or schedule your event pages to publish at a later time and date.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used to promote your events, such as currency, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Exportable Data. You can output all of your data collected from your event participants into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, implementing new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WordPress WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily add images and write your event descriptions without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any other WordPress post or page.
- Registrant Records. You can manage your attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
- Team Member Management. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Accurate Participant Management. You have control of your participants’ information; who has enrolled, which event they have registered for 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 a list of event attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your participants individually or as a group.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data which can be useful for web developers who are potential application problems.
- 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 modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a very large range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to significantly expand the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these add-ons 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 available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add-on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can schedule as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search for events that take place within a certain date range.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: Add 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 Add on: The Custom Files add on allows you to bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add-on adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. 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. Registrants can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 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 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 lets developers build custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Customers – Testimonials
Below are just some of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”It’s been very comprehensive and covers exactly the aspects of event registration that we needed for our site plus some features that we didn’t even need but could still use in the future. Very Excellent Plugin!” Tristan Hall, Area 12:2 Youth Group
”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
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, event promoter, or event consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, spend a little time visiting the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow and improve the experience of your customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WP coding rules. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent customer support, as many of its clients confirm:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
Event Espresso provides amazing support that includes 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 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 an established team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to manage your events.
Product Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you should consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This option lets you install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about problems and share feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP website owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run any event that involves managing dates and venues, registering participants, and selling seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
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