Event Espresso - WordPress Event Management Plugin

Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require bookings, such as seminars, group courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, corporate events, or even a big event such as an art exhibition, 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 complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely need to manage calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, attendee numbers, data processing, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to attendees.

There are lots of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for recurring events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.

The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be very expensive.

Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.

Introducing …

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Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software

Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software

Plugin Description

The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up multiple events and begin processing bookings literally in a few minutes.

(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event bookings)

Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.

Create custom registration forms

You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.

View detailed information about your event attendees

Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.

Go here to learn more about the plugin:

Event Espresso

Benefits Of Using Event Espresso

Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:

Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution

Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.

Increased Business Productivity

By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.

Basically, you are making it easier for participants to perform the registration themselves.

Allowing your participants to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you focus more energy on planning a more unique event.

Complete Control Over The User Experience

As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.

Additional plugin benefits include the following:

Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a third party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy optional addons when you need extra functionality.
Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event sign-ups 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite friends who may be interested in attending.
Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process can remain entirely online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you obtain from event participants.

Event Espresso Features

The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to its customers through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.

Event Espresso offers many features to web site owners. Here are just some of these:

Quick and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
Customized Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you collect specific information using a custom event registration form on your website to create a great experience for your event participants.
Customizable Event Designs. Match your website’s look and feel for your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and elements, plus HTML and/or CSS.
Tax Admin & Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to administer taxes for an event and report tax fees to customers when purchasing tickets. You can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to configure the settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
Spam Protection. Reduce the likelihood of spamming and bots making false registrations on your site with reCAPTCHA features that provide human authentication.
Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to know who your clients are and how you’ve done past business with your customers. Your Contact Profile page records the name, biography, contact information, event registration details, comments, etc. about each customer.
Admin Pre-approval. Control who can participate in your events.
Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by allowing potential prospects to interact with you online via commenting and past participants to post comments that can help others consider whether or not to register. Moderation settings for commenting are configured via the WordPress built-in commenting admin area.
Draft Events. Draft events allow you to build an event over time without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your events until you are ready to publish it on your site, or schedule to publish your event at a later date and time.
Complete Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and allows you to automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event page designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, limits on attendees, printable ticketing and more.
Exportable Data. You can export all the information collected from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for creating reports, implementing marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
Multiple Event Participant. Event Espresso 4 allows one person or people to pay for multiple tickets and different ticket types at once. Event managers decide how many attendees can enroll in one registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
Registrant Profiles. You can manage each attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily within reach.
Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event customers who have not paid yet for their admission with a standard but personalized invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will reference pre-registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the balance they owe, and include links to the event information, a payment url and a url to download the invoice.
Categorize Events. If you have multiple event types like free and paid, conference speakers and breakout sessions, different types of courses, etc. you can categorize them to help your attendees to locate what they’re looking for. You can display all the events in a category on an event category page, make events searchable by category, and colour-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, in addition to suggesting new events in the categories that appeal to your existing customers.

Extra features include:

Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 permits more complex extensions and customizations to the software.
Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for regular site traffic whenever you need to carry out maintenance on your website. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, Event Espresso’s objective 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 efficient 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+ additional features, including:

Email shortcodes that includes customer data in emails and newsletters.
Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to tickets).
Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.

Event Espresso Add-Ons

As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to further expand the functionality of events.

Some of these add ons include:

Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can schedule as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template displays categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name shows the events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your website uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on 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 your 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 enter personal information into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also look up event history and make payment for new events.
Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Versions: This add on lets you involve staff in your organization to help manage your events 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 WP users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, so others can help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas 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.
Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing addon adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you 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 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.
EE4 Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on provides event managers with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to modify 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 their own custom templates using one of the templates included as a base template.
MailChimp Integration Add-on: The MailChimp addon lets you automatically register participants to a specified autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.

Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.

For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:

Event Espresso

Customers – Testimonials

Below are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied plugin users have written about Event Espresso:

”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”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
”Hello. I wanted to say that I’ve purchased Event Espresso twice now for two different organizations and have had great success with the purchases. Outside of photography, I also build small websites with WordPress as the CMS. I built two websites for two different martial arts organizations who host yearly seminars and tournaments. The plug in has provided a way for attendees to sign up online from both Canada and the United States with ease, and also allowed the organizations to easily manage payments, attendee lists, and many other aspects of the events. Thanks to Seth for creating such a great plug in, and for your constant support!” James Zedd, James Zedd Photography

Plugin Tips

Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, event planner, or event management consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.

After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the user forum for new ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your attendees.

Support

Event Espresso is compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP development rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its plugin users 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

The Event Espresso software provides incredible support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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 web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run your events.

Software Price

Event Espresso is available in different plugin 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 premium plugin versions below:

Personal Edition – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
Everything Edition – This lets you run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
Developer License – This edition lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one 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 special offers. When we last checked, the software is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management

Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.

Additional Plugin Information

The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.

Use the plugin’s documentation pages 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 situation, or to report issues and leave feedback.

For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.

The Bottom Line

Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used by thousands.

If you own a WordPress-powered site and you currently run events that require managing dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and/or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.