Do you currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings, such as workshops, group courses, non-profit fund-raisers, corporate conferences, 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 can be a complex process. You will most likely have to manage scheduling, available dates and seating allocations, attendee numbers, data processing, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to participants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for similar events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website, you can set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create an event and begin accepting online bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to register themselves.
Allowing your participants to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you spend more of your resources on creating a more enjoyable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy addons only when you need added features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online sign-ups outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process remains entirely online, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the data collected from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique built-in to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to create as many kinds of tickets as you need and specify different pricing options, limits on ticket quantities, etc.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Customers can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with several payment gateways, enabling you to collect registration payments before running the events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse events details throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the likelihood of spamming and bots creating fake registrations with reCAPTCHA features to provide human authentication.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of registrants and check-in those who have attended.
- Ticketless Events. You can create events without the requirement for attendees to get tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all types of events, not only when tickets are required.
- Event RSS Feeds. Provide automatic updates to your users, drive quality traffic and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Latest WordPress Version. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create beautiful event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Multi-Language Software. Event Espresso is being translated into 15+ languages, and more translations are being added all the time.
- Exportable Data. You can output all of your data gathered from event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, devising new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Multiple Participant Enrolments. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or people to book multiple attendees at the same time. You control how many attendees can enrol in a single booking session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you network with an expert community of experienced event managers and plugin users. You can interact with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential clients who have not made payment for their admission with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click. Your invoices will reference pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the balance owing, and include links to the event information, a payment url and a url to download the invoice.
- Categorize Events. If you have a number of event types like free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different kinds of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize these to help your registrants to find what they’re searching for. You can display all events in a category on an event category page, make events searchable by category, and color-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, in addition to suggesting other events in the categories that appeal to your visitors.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows web developers to have more control and options over your event page content and how your information displays to your visitors.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for developers who are potential plugin problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And 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 mission, the software has been built using a modular and effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the need to re-enter event information when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Add ons
As well as an incredible number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to significantly enhance the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Addon: 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 Drop-down Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize many datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your web site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event prices when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered site users can have access to your special events. Members can also store personal details into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Users can also view previous events and pay for future events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Editions: This add on lets you include others in the event management process and give new users permission 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 capabilities, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do 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 Add on: The Ticketing add on gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon 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 handling check-in scans at the venue door. 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories using a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software add-on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track bookings, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Here are a few of the many testimonials that plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is so easy to use yet feature rich and stable. It is a cornerstone of our site and our success.” Fraser Barner, Speaker’s Lab
”I have to say that it has been the right choice for me…I’ve been extremely pleased with the way my site is working.” Robin, RobinTime
”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
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, conference promoter, or event management professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, visit the support forum for new ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow and improve the experience of your event attendees.
Product Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as so many of its customers attest:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
Event Espresso provides robust support including access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to manage your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This license option lets you set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on five sites. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up 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 if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about bugs and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of companies.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run an event that involves scheduling dates, times and venues, registering attendees, and/or booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration System
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