You’re selling a ticket for your event at $25 dollars each. You sold 100 tickets. The amount you have to pay to Eventbrite is already $250. That is almost 10% of your revenue going to Eventbrite. That fee does not include the payment transaction fees you must also pay to process payments. Imagine if you have a higher ticket price or you sold more tickets. No wonder, event planners are trying to look for cheaper alternatives to Eventbrite.
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The big event you’ve been planning for is happening. Registered participants are starting to come in when your receptionist suddenly experiences a glitch in her records. The line starts to form and you fear that participants might get impatient. Event planners, you can avoid this potential problem because we will teach you how to create QR code for event registration.
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Imagine snagging the best seat in the house before anyone else, all while saving a significant chunk of change. That’s the magic of early bird tickets. In a world where the early bird catches the worm, savvy event-goers are reaping the rewards of planning.
In this article, we will give you all the information you need to know what is early bird tickets and their benefits on helping boost ticket sales.
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Events have become an important avenue for nonprofit organizations to raise funds and generate awareness for their cause or advocacy. It can get overwhelming trying to discover what to look for in an event registration platform. This article will give you everything you need to look for and why Event Espresso is the best for nonprofit event ticketing.
(more…)In Event Espresso 4, if you manage the online event registration and ticketing for a category of events (e.g. volunteering opportunities or an on-going writing workshop) you can configure ONE event page and let the multiple datetime and multiple ticket names specify the different dates and ticket options.
Configuring your events this way allows you to:
Here is an example of this strategy with all the upcoming volunteering opportunities for a non-profit organization.
In this case your organization offers multiple types of volunteering opportunities that occur on different dates. Once you have configured your event registration and ticketing for these similar types of events, your potential customers/attendees/volunteers will be presented with all the volunteering opportunities on ONE page. This is what the front-end would look like (click to enlarge).
You can only get this type of control with Event Espresso.
Event Espresso Arabica can be downloaded from the pre-release channel
In case you missed it this morning, Event Espresso Arabica (4.0, the plugin version formerly known as Event Espresso 3.2) is now available on the pre-release channel. Now before you go nuts, there are a few things you should know about this version. Read through these caveats, then go nuts.
Event Espresso Arabica is an almost complete rewrite of the Event Espresso core plugin. To start, Arabica will be supporting all of the features of the free plugin (which will henceforth be referred to as the decaffeinated version). This means that the initial release, Event Espresso 4.0, will only be supporting the features of the decaffeinated Event Espresso. Many features will be unavailable until 4.1. Event Espresso Arabica is also currently still a beta version, which means there may be bugs. We will be leaving it in beta for an extra month while we work on developing and testing 4.1 so that we can be sure that when it’s released into the world that we’ve had enough hands and bodies testing it. What’s new in this version? Plenty. Here’s a breakdown:
In short, we’ve tried to fix all the stuff that you’ve been frustrated with over the past 2 years and pack it into a new system that’s built on a much more solid foundation.
Event Espresso Arabica (particularly 4.0) is not a straight upgrade from the current version and probably won’t be until 4.1. At that point there will be an upgrade script to help the migration process from 3.1 to Arabica, but this will not be added in the initial release. (When this script is created, we will be doing our best to make it possible to import the majority of your critical event related data from the old system. However, as has been the case in the past, there will likely be cases where the data structure is too different to do a reliable import. In those few cases, we will give recommendations on how to set things up.) If you have a previous install of Event Espresso, you will need to dump your Event Espresso data before you can use Event Espresso Arabica or install it on a new site. For a lot of people, this could just mean creating a new database, exporting your WordPress content from it with the built-in export tool, delete your wp-config.php file and start fresh. For people a bit more savvy it could mean dropping all the tables in the database that start with wp_events_. As mentioned above, this is going to support the features of the free version. Which means that it probably won’t support your choice payment gateway…at least not right away. We’ll have the PayPal standard gateway from the start, as well as offline payment methods. Other gateways will be added based on usage, which we are going to start tracking in Event Espresso version 3.1.32. It’s also not going to support all of the add-ons — that support probably won’t become available until after 4.1, possibly around 4.2. (If you’re worried about the versioning system, don’t. While in the past we stuck on 3.1 release for more than a year, these version numbers will iterate at a much more rapid pace with our current development schedule.)
If you’re still reading, that means you’re probably as excited to get your hands on this thing as we are to get it out there. That’s what we want. It’s frustrating having this thing that hardly anyone can use and we’ve been anxious to get it out but we want to make sure what we put out is worth your time, especially considering the initial limitations. If you aren’t signed up already, you should sign up for the pre-release channel on your account page to get access to Event Espresso Arabica. If you have signed up for the pre-release channel, you will already have access and all you need to do is download it. If we haven’t already, we will be adding an Event Espresso Arabica forum in our support forums, where you can post any questions, problems or bugs you find after downloading 4.0.
We all know Event Espresso can do lots of different types of events. One of the most basic events — by which I mean, one that Event Espresso lends itself naturally to — is concerts and performances. Music venues have a maximum capacity — which can be set with the maximum number of attendees setting — and venue information can be stored in the venue manager and used to provide information and a Google Map about the venue. With the seating chart, ticketing add-on and mobile app, you can sell actual seats and check people in at the door.
One of our users who has been working with Event Espresso for a long time has built a couple sites for a couple music venues in Canada that have really paid off. His name is Mark and he runs Muskoka Graphics, a small design and development studio. His background in the music industry led to some jobs for local venues which ultimately needed to be able to sell tickets online. In the early days, this was handled by a simple, customizable script Mark wrote that would handle the PayPal purchase. But as these websites grew, so did his need for a more robust, reliable platform, and that’s when he found Event Espresso.
In the early days Mark contacted us often and we saw this as an opportunity to really stress test the plugin for our ideal client — someone running an actual venue on Event Espresso. Mark says the thing he likes most about using Event Espresso is the support. “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.” Most of the early issues in those days had to do with scale — these were venues that were selling events out quickly which wasn’t something we had previously had the opportunity to test for. This led to numerous speed and stability enhancements in the plugin. After a while, we stopped hearing from Mark.
So imagine our surprise and enthusiasm when he contacted us to let us know that one of the two sites he’s built using Event Espresso made over $35,000 in less than 48 hours running the latest version of Event Espresso!
Peter’s Players is a small, 88 seat theatre that specializes in world class artists like Johnny Winter, Taj Mahal and John Lee Hooker. The other venue Mark maintains, the Kee, seats 1000 and also brings in top tier artists and has seen Snoop Dogg, April Wine and The Tragically Hip. Says Mark, “I have watched [Event Espresso] perform on my server after a mass email have over 40 people buying online almost simultaneously. I have watched [Event Espresso] sell 1000 tickets in 3 hours. They are rock solid and I trust them with my clients businesses.” Mark uses mostly the out-of-the-box features of Event Espresso — waiting lists, coupon codes & early registration discounts, and invoices — but also takes advantage of the WP User Integration add-on to provide member discounts for registered users.
This is only the latest success story of Event Espresso. Recently, Garth pulled together some numbers based on the User Survey responses we’ve been collecting over the past year. With the user-survey data we were able to estimate that Event Espresso powers over 250,000 events and sells over 100 million tickets per year! This deserves its own blog post in the future, but we thought you’d find it interesting that the example above is not the exception.
Is your business or organization among these? Let us know in the comments! And please share with us your Event Espresso success story, we’d love to hear it.
Updated: The Multi-Event Registration Add-on is now available.
I don’t know how else to put it, except to say that this is really awesome functionality!
Gone are the days when people can only register for one event at a time. We have been developing a system that allows people to register and pay for multiple events at one time. The theory is that when it’s easier for your attendees to register for more events you will sell more tickets; and with the Multi-Event Registration System it couldn’t be easier.
Some of the features of the multi-event registration system addon include:
This new addon will be very useful in situations when you want attendees to register for a main event and also sub-events such as conference breakout sessions; when your events are for the entire family, but you want each member of the family to register for separate events; etc.
This new addon has taken a long time to construct but it’s nearly done. We are accepting applications to beta test the multiple event registration addon, and you can follow the multi-event registration development progress in the forums.
In order to keep the base-price of Event Espresso low for those who do not need this functionality, this addon will be sold separately for about $40.
We encourage all Event Espresso users to consider how the multi-event registration system can help you save time and sell more tickets.
Event Editor
Redesigned interface for managing events.
Attendee Groups
Group registrations are now easier to manage.
Customizable Templates
Templates can be moved to your uploads directory and easily customized.
Multiple Payment Options
Payment options such as Authorize.net, PayPal, PDF Invoice, Check/Money Order and Bank Transfers can be customized using the new payment gateway management interface.
Event Espresso makes it easy to manage and customize events and registrations to to your business, personal website, or sporting event needs.
A few of Event Espresso’s built-in features include: