Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings, such as workshops, community courses, non-profit fundraisers, social events, or even a large-scale event like a music concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations is a time-consuming process. You will probably have to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and seating allocations, registration numbers, data collection and storage, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate previous events, give you more control, create a better client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily create an event and begin receiving online registrations in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use various 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 participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: 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 fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the software has been revamped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating participants to register by themselves.
Allowing your participants to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more of your resources on organizing a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party provider. This is made possible through a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy addons only when you need additional features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new signups 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social features and addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with other people they know who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can remain entirely online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the data you acquire from your event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Ready to start using in no time.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. With Event Espresso you can collect specific information using custom event registration forms on your web site to plan a great experience for your users.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with the WordPress calendar.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of options to manage taxes for your event and report tax fee components to customers who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary registrant’s information for any additional attendees.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily by pre-configuring default ticket pricing.
- Promotional Codes. Set up promotion and multiple discount codes to encourage visitors to take action now, or make your offerings more affordable for others. This is also practical if you want to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of participants and confirm those who have attended.
- Ticketless Events. Promote events without the requirement for registrants to get tickets. Use Event Espresso for any form of event, not only those that accept tickets.
- XML RSS Event Feeds. Keep your customers updated about your events, bring in more visitors and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you develop your event at your own pace without displaying it live on your website. You can continue working on your event until you are ready to take it live, or schedule to publish your event at a future date and time.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, etc.
- Import Events. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that lets you quickly import bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and upload details about events, datetimes, ticketing details, prices, custom registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Participant Registration. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or a group to pay for multiple tickets and different ticket types at the same time. You decide how many attendees are allowed to register in one booking session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Attendee Profiles. You can manage your customer’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Team Member Manager. Save time and keep your business organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in your event description.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can even customize your templates to display events in your own custom way.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 enables more complex developments and customizations to the plugin.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for normal website visitors whenever site maintenance is needed. You can continue to work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their site, 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 company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Grid Template Addon: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If an event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events management add-on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can create as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to browse for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Add-on: This addon adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add-on provides PHP files that let you override certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Versions: This addon lets you include other users in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and assign them different permissions with different privileges, allowing staff to help you manage your events or 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 sections 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.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add on adds the ability to generate 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 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.
- Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin add-on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track registrations, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, event planner, or event management professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WordPress plugins and WordPress 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 clients confirm:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
Event Espresso provides amazing support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider using one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This edition enables you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This allows you to run Event Espresso on five domains. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to report problems and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WordPress website owners.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you intend to run events that require scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin
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