Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings, such as seminars, community courses, not-for-profit fund raisers, corporate events, or even a large-scale event like a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a complex process. You need to manage calendar schedules, availability, participant numbers, data processing, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for similar events, give you more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can easily install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily schedule your event and start processing online bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing applications.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, 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 some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into an automated and feature-rich event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to enroll themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you focus more resources on delivering a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a third-party service. This is made possible by using a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add ons when you need new features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online bookings 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process remains wholly in digital form, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Information. You own all the information acquired from event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users via built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of features to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and configure. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure as many kinds of tickets as you want and set unique pricing options, ticket quantity limits, etc.
- Event Calendar. Participants can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using the WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect booking payments before running the events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and display registrant information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let you create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing for your default ticket.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees at the door, or send in paper-based registration forms for manual processing later.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can participate in your events.
- RSS Event Feeds. Keep your site readers up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and expand your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword-Rich Page URLs. Keyword-rich event page URLs take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly web links that have topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your events.
- Multi-Language Application. Event Espresso has been translated into 15+ languages, and more are being added all the time.
- Exportable Data. You can export all the data collected from your event participants into Excel or CSV format for producing advanced reports, implementing marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Multiple Event Attendee. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or an organization to purchase multiple tickets and different ticket types at the same time. You control how many people are able to enrol in one registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Software Upgrades. Event Espresso offers simple 1-click upgrading to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Team Member Management. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in an event description.
- Event Reporting. Event reporting provides you with data of all registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue you’ve collected.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with WordPress.
- Control Box Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reconfigure the user interface to match your workflow processes. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely removed from the workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: 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 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 edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in notification emails and email newsletters.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Add ons
As well as a comprehensive number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow you to significantly expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with multiple datetimes into a dropdown list.
- 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 image instead of a date.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your event lists in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Versions: This add-on lets you involve your staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers permission to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, so others can help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WordPress 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 addon.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your potential attendees the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing registrants will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their shopping cart. With the Multi-Event Registration add on, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories using an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add on allows you to automatically register participants to a specific mailing list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Users – Feedback
Below are some of the many great testimonials that customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso rocks! I use it for my dance class registrations. Unlike most dance studios where people have to call or send an email in advance, Event Espresso puts a registration form right there in front of the user and allows me to collect valuable information from the user during the registration process with custom questions such as “Do you have previous dance experience?” or “How did you hear about us?”. It also gives my site a professional look and feel.” Ral, Ral’eau Salsa Dance Company
”Customizing an Event Registration plugin for WordPress by @EventEspresso. Love the pro version. Highly Recommended!” Joshua Garity
”I’m so excited to fire Eventbrite! Event Espresso has an amazing WP plugin for event management. We’re testing it now & are very impressed! In a nutshell Event Espresso saves us money & does everything Eventbrite did before. :)” Dustin Nay
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, concert promoter, or event management professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its clients attest:
“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, knowledge base and how tos, custom development 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 software you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Product Licensing Cost
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This option allows you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to run 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 Edition – This enables you to install Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
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 seller when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a specific use-case, or to notify developers about errors and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you plan to run events that require scheduling dates and venues, booking participants, or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration Plugin
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