Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need handling registrations, such as workshops, group classes, charity fund-raisers, social events, or even a big event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complex process. You may be required to co-ordinate scheduling, availability, participant numbers, data collection and storage, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to attendees.
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 reproduce similar events, give you more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based web site, you can easily set up an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily create an event and start receiving online bookings literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 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 Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for event attendees to register themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more time on delivering a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy optional add-ons only when you need extra features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online bookings 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can be transacted entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information gathered from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers through standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to website owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and implement. Ready to use in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you collect unique information using a custom event registration form on your site to prepare a tailored experience for your attendees.
- Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. Match your web site’s look and feel for your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and parts, as well as HTML and CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects so they can choose the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to customize the display settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the chance of spamming and bot software programs making false registrations on your website by using reCAPTCHA tools to authenticate human activity.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how you’ve previously engaged with them. The Contact Profile section records the name, biography, contact information, event registration history, private comments, and more about each attendee.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is sold out. Additionally, you can specify that wait-listed attendees pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record comments about users on their profile. Private commenting lets you keep records of when event participants contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have assisted your customers.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to develop an event page over multiple work sessions without displaying it live on your site. You can keep building your events until you are ready to take it live, or schedule to publish your event page at a future date and time.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in full control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing, and allows you to automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, custom event designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, limits on attendees, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Bulk Upload Event Data. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing feature that allows you to import bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WordPress Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert images and write your content without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post or page.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso provides users with access to a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, designers, marketers and business owners who also use the software. You can interact with other members of the Event Espresso community via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential participants who have not made payment for their admission with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will address pre-registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the balance they owe, and include a link to the event details, a payment url and a url to download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Participant Management. You have control of your participants’ records; who has registered, for what event and how much they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of attendees to a spreadsheet for additional reports, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your event attendees on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over the content of your event pages and how your information displays to your prospects.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers who are troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: 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 objectives, the software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the need to re-enter event data when creating new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add ons
In addition to a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to further expand the functionality of events.
Some of these add ons 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 the event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize the events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to browse for events that take place within a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your web site is featured on 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 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 website users will have access to these special events. Members can also store 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 view event history and make payment for events.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon 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 add-on allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to every seat.
- Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing addon adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the door. Customers can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template addon provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you edit 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 design custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp add on lets you automatically register participants to a particular mailing list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Customer Feedback
Below are a few of the testimonials that satisfied 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
”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 am in love with your product, I work with many educational institutions that hold classes/events and I will definitely recommend this to all of them, the only time I have seen a system this comprehensive and sophisticated is when an organization I worked with paid a programmer nearly $8,000 for a custom solution, and yet still there are features in your registration system that his didn’t have. Thank you so much for your help and patience.” Abdullah J.
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, concert promoter, or event management professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, spend a little time going through the forums for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and WP themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its customers confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The software provides robust support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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 solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This edition allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This edition lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
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.
Use the software’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to report problems and give feedback.
For all 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 management plugin, used by thousands of companies.
If you own a WordPress site and you currently run any event that involves managing dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and/or selling tickets, 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 – WordPress Event Manager And Registration System
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