Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings, such as seminars, training classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, marketing functions, or even a large-scale event such as an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complex process. You have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, date availability, attendee numbers, data collection and admin, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event participants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce previously-run events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based web site, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software allows you to easily create an event and begin accepting bookings in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling event participants to enrol on their own.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you direct more attention on organizing a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a 3rd party service. This is made possible through a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional addons when you need additional features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event bookings 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with others who may also be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process is conducted entirely online, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data gathered from your event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to users through standard features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great features to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you set up as many different types of tickets as you need and specify separate pricing options, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Easily configure automatic booking and payment notification email messages to communicate with event customers.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect money before running your events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration details for any added attendees.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily with pre-configured default ticket pricing.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with three built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event participants and confirm those who have attended.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can attend your events.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record notes about contacts on their profile and how you’ve interacted with them. Private commenting enables you to keep a record of when event participants contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have assisted your contacts.
- Optimized For The Latest WordPress Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build beautifully-designed event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used to promote events, such as currency, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Exportable Information. You can output all of your data gathered from your event participants into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, implementing new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows information about a venue to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your site to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue record has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes information such as venue seating capacity, venue web address, venue phone number, physical, location map, etc. You can also list venue profiles on specific locations of your WordPress theme as well as on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a given venue.
- Attendee Records. Manage each attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily within reach.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and your website visitors can help promote your event using social sharing buttons.
- Transaction Reporting. Event reporting gives you information of all the registrations and transactions, allowing you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue you have collected.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are compatible with WordPress.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data that can be useful for web developers who are diagnosing application errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their site, Event Espresso’s goal is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their goals, the company operates on a model 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 – streamlines the work of re-entering event information when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to further enhance the functionality of your event management process.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display your scheduled events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can create as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to display an event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your web site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files addon allows you to bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add on lets you include other users 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 WP users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others to help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain areas of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories using a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on lets you auto-register attendees to a specified autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Here are a few of the testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”I want to commend you on a fabulous product which is just the right price for a small non-profit. People are happy with the registration process, as are we! …Thank you SO much for a great product.” Sandra Forero Bush, World Trade Center Tacoma
“I just completed my first event using Event Espresso. I really believe without Event Espresso my event would not have been the success it was.” Cathy Earle, Women Only Weekend
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, show planner, 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 licensed user, search the forums for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management process and enhance the experience of your event participants.
Product Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent customer support, as so many of its satisfied 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
The software provides amazing support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to run your events.
Product Price
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you should consider purchasing one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This lets you run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This lets you set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on five sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to report problems and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of event promoters.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run an event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and/or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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