Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require bookings, such as workshops, training courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, networking conferences, or even a big event such as a trade exhibit, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event registrations is a complex process. You will most likely be required to co-ordinate event schedules, date availability, attendee numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce previous events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can set up an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up an event and begin accepting online bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
More info:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for participants to perform the enrolment process themselves.
Allowing your customers to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you concentrate more energy on planning a better event.
Complete 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 customers to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own software 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 needs of most users) and then purchase add-ons when you need additional functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new bookings any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite others who may be interested in attending.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can remain entirely online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information gathered from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to its users via standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
- Customized Notification Email Message. Easily configure customized automated booking and payment notification emails to communicate with event registrants.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with several payment gateways, enabling you to collect money prior to running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to configure the settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily by pre-configuring system-default ticket pricing.
- Promotional Codes. Offer promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage prospects to register now, or simply make your events more appealing for others. Also useful if you want to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to know who your clients are and how they have done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event has reached capacity. You can also make it a requirement wait-listed attendees pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- RSS Event Feeds. Automatically update your users, bring in more visitors and reach a wider number of potential customers with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Most Up-To-Date Version Of WP. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create beautiful event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in full control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and also lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, custom event designs, payment processing, wait lists, limits on attendees, printable ticketing and more.
- Exportable Data. You can output all of your information gathered from event participants into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, implementing marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Register Multiple Event Participants. EE 4 allows a single person or people to purchase multiple tickets and different ticket types at once. Event managers decide how many attendees are able to enrol in a single registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Registrant Profiles. Manage your attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event participants who have not paid in full for their booking with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click. Your invoices will reference registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the amount they owe, and include a link to the event, a payment link and a url where they can download a PDF invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can even customize the page templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for most WP users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 permits more complex enhancements and customizations to the plugin.
- Control Box Management & Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reorganize the user interface to suit your workflow processes. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from the workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 objectives, the company operates on a modular and efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the need to re-enter event details when adding new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an incredible number of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to significantly 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 allows you to display your upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of your recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon allows you to take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site can have access to your special events. Members can also store personal details into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Users can also view event history and pay for events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add on is great for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to every seat.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add-on adds the capacity to generate 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 managing check-in scans at venues. Registrants 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 Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add-on: The MailChimp add-on allows you to auto-register participants to a specified mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
Testimonials
Below are a few of the testimonials that satisfied plugin users have written 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 is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, festival planner, or event professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the user forum for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive technical support, as many of its end-users confirm:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
The Event Espresso software provides robust support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license option lets you install Event Espresso on one domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license option allows you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license option enables you to install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing 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 register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about problems and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you plan to run events that require scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, and booking seating, then you will probably not find a better WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
***
