Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings, such as seminars, group classes, charity fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event like a rave party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings can be a complex process. You may have to manage scheduling, event dates, registration numbers, data collection and storage, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate repeat events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can install an inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily create an event and begin processing registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize your event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
Learn more here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating 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 doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are enabling participants to enrol themselves.
Letting your customers to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you concentrate more attention on creating a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a 3rd party provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy addons when you need new features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event sign-ups outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process is conducted wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information acquired from your event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to its customers through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of features to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Match your site’s design for your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s template options and components, and HTML or CSS.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides several ways to manage taxes for your event and report tax fees to registrants who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to customize the settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the default ticket price of your system-default ticket.
- Mobile 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 attendees.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event attendees at the door, or sending in paper forms for manual processing later.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. You can also specify that waiting list members pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- RSS Event Feeds. Keep your website readers updated about your events, drive quality traffic and widen your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft Events. Draft events enable you to develop an event page over time without publishing it to your site. You can keep building your events until you are ready to take it live, or schedule to publish your event pages at a future date and time.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of all aspects of your event’s registration and ticketing, and also lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, customizable event page designs, payment processing, wait lists, limits on attendees, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Import Events. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that enables you to import bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, custom registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WP WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily insert images and write your event descriptions without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any standard WP post or page.
- Automatic Upgrading. Event Espresso provides simple 1-click software installation updating to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your installation compatible with new versions of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential participants who have not paid in full for their admission with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with just one click. Your invoices will address registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the amount owing, and include links to the event details, a payment url and a link where they can download the invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize the templates to display events in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for non-technical WP users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 enables more complex developments and customizations to the plugin.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers who are diagnosing software problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, 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 goals, the company operates on 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 comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Addons
In addition to an incredible range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to significantly enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
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 an event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events management add on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template displays the categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name displays all events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add on: This add-on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to these special events. Members can also add personal data into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Users can also look up event history and pay for new events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Versions: This addon lets you include other users in the event management process and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers the capacity 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 WordPress 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.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add on gives you the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at the venue door. Registrants 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This addon uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories using an attractive graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft 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 customer data, track bookings, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, show promoter, or event consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the user forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your event participants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent technical support, as so many of its end-users attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides exceptional support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority support and even a monthly VIP member pass that gives 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 depend on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you may want to consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This allows you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This lets you install Event Espresso on one domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This enables you to run Event Espresso on 5 domains. 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. Presently, the plugin is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Additional 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 plugin’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 situation, or to notify developers about problems and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of WordPress site owners.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run an event that involves scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and/or booking 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 here: Event Espresso
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