Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings, such as workshops, community courses, charity fundraisers, social functions, or even a big event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event bookings is a time-consuming process. You will probably have to co-ordinate scheduling, date availability, participant numbers, data collection and admin, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event attendees.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily reproduce previously-run events, give you more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create your event and start receiving online bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can employ various event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as it has been rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into an automated and feature-rich event management website … 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 solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling participants to register on their own.
Letting your participants to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your energy on creating a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase optional add ons when you need new features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event sign-ups outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process remains wholly in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data you acquire from event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its customers through standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great built-in to web site owners. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Ready to start accepting registrations in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can gather specific data using custom event registration forms on your web site to create a great experience for your clients.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Easily set up automatic booking and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with your customers.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments prior to running events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse events details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing for the default ticket.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track your participants.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how they have done business with you.
- No Ticket Events. You can create events without requiring registrants to select tickets. Use Event Espresso for any kind of event, not only those that require tickets.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential registrants to interact with you online via commenting and previous attendees to post feedback that can help others consider whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for comments are configured via the WP default commenting admin area.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page URLs. Keyword rich Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” urls with relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and improves your search rankings, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your events.
- Multi-Language Plugin. Event Espresso is is available in more than 15 languages, and more languages are being added all the time.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for your events, you can easily set up as your default ticket for any new events simply by checking a box.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WordPress Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily add photos and create your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post.
- Automatic Plugin Updates. Event Espresso offers simple one-click upgrading to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and site visitors can spread the word about your event using social media share buttons.
- Attendee Reports. Event reporting gives you data of the registrations and transactions, allowing you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over your events and how the information displays to visitors.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data that can be useful for developers when troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the mission statement on their website, Event Espresso’s goal 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 in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the need to re-enter event data when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add-Ons
As well as an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to significantly enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these addons include:
- EE4 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 instead.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events management addon lets you put your 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 registrations for all of your recurring events.
- 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 image instead of a date.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website 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 look up previous events and make payment for future events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add-on 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 right from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to every seat.
- Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing add-on adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. Customers 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories in an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp addon lets you auto-register participants to a chosen mailing list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Users – Testimonials
Below are some of the many testimonials that customers have written 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
”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
”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 gym owner, presenter, festival planner, or event management consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, search the user forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management process or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive technical support, as many of its plugin customers 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 support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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 WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license option allows you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This option allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This option enables you to set up Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
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.
Event Espresso – Additional 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.
Search the software’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a specific use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run any event that involves managing dates and venues, booking attendees, or booking seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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