Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community courses, charity fund raisers, marketing functions, or even a big event such as a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups is a complicated and time-consuming process. You need to co-ordinate event schedules, available dates and seating, attendee numbers, data administration, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily reproduce previous events, give you more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can easily install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up your event and start accepting online bookings in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin 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 web site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for participants to perform the registration themselves.
Allowing your clients to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you direct more energy on creating a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add-ons when you need new functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new bookings 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite others who may be interested.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process can remain entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the data obtained from event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to users via standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to website owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Ready to start using in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration. Event Espresso lets you collect specific data using a custom event registration form on your web site to plan a customized experience for your customers.
- Event Calendar. Customers can easily see your events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospective registrants and let them choose the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and display contact information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the likelihood of spammers and robots making bogus registrations on your web site with reCAPTCHA settings that provide human authentication.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track event participants.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of participants and check in those who attend.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can and cannot participate in your events.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record observations about event registrants on their profile and how you’ve helped your contacts. Private commenting allows you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have helped your customers.
- Draft Events. Draft events allow you to develop an event page in your own time-frame without publishing it to your site. You can work on your event until you are ready to take it live, or schedule to publish your event at a later time and date.
- Country Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency, currency symbols, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your data collected from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, devising new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Register Multiple Attendees. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or people to purchase multiple tickets and different types of tickets at once. You control how many people are able to enrol in one session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you interact with an expert community of event managers and other plugin users. You can network with other Event Espresso users using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Team Member Management. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as staff member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in your event description.
- Accurate Event Participant Manager. You control your participants’ details; who has enrolled, for what event and how much they 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 an event attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send custom payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your customers 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 your event page content and how the information displays to your prospective customers.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for developers who are diagnosing plugin errors.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: 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 goals, the company operates on a modular and effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the need to re-enter event details when creating new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Add ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the functionality of your event management system.
Some of these add-ons 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, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add-on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can schedule as many events in advance as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking on a category name displays the events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files addon provides PHP files that let you override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Editions: This addon lets you involve others in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the ability 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 capabilities, so your staff can help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain areas of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts 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 add-on.
- Multiple Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives potential attendees the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their shopping cart. With the Multiple Event Registration addon, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories via an attractive graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
User Feedback
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have posted 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
”I have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival
”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
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, festival promoter, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time visiting the user forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management process and enhance the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WP development rules. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as many of its plugin end-users attest:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
The Event Espresso plugin provides great 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you install Event Espresso on five sites. Pricing 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 depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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 plugin’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a specific use-case, or to report bugs and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of WP site owners.
If you own a WordPress site and you plan to run events that require managing dates and venues, registering participants, and reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration Software
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