Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings, such as workshops, community classes, non-profit fund raisers, corporate functions, or even a large-scale event like an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event registrations can be a time-consuming process. You may be required to co-ordinate calendar schedules, date availability, participant numbers, data administration, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate previous events, give you more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can easily install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule an event and start processing online bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even 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 need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for participants to complete the sign-up process by themselves.
Letting your clients to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more of your resources on creating a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible through a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add ons only when you need additional features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new event bookings outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite their friends who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process can remain wholly in digital form, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information collected from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its customers via standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you set up multiple ticket types and specify different prices, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- Event Calendar. Registrants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with the calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects so they can purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s details for any added registrants.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of your default ticket.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and can’t register for your events.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record comments about contacts on their profile and how you have assisted them. Private commenting helps you keep records of when event registrants contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have helped them.
- SEO Friendly Page URLs. Keyword rich event page URLs take advantage of your WP Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly permalinks that have relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you get more potential customers to your website.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to be deployed throughout Event Espresso and your WordPress themes. The organization information include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, phone, tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Data. You can output all the information collected from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, devising marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager feature in EE 4 allows details about a venue to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform potential attendees of the location of your event. The venue profile displays many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes information like venue seating capacity, venue website, telephone number, venue address, maps, etc. You can also list venues in various areas in your theme as well as on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Attendee Profiles. You can manage each attendee’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized and easily within reach.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event clients who have not paid yet for their registration with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will reference registered attendees who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the amount they owe, and include links to the event details, a payment url and a link to download the invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can even customize the page templates to display events in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for most users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), Event Espresso 4 makes possible more complex developments and customizations to the application.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data which can be useful for web developers who are potential software errors.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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 mission, the software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the work of re-entering event information when creating new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow software users to significantly enhance the functionality of events.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events management add-on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can create as many events in advance as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of your 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 show the event thumbnail instead of the date.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: This addon adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files add on provides PHP files that let you bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on 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 the capacity 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 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 sections 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 Add-on: The Ticketing add on adds the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the door. Customers 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 Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you edit the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also lets web developers design custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API add-on lets other applications, websites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Users – Feedback
Here are just some of the many testimonials that users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”This really is a hell of a plugin. For me, it’s probably the final nail in the coffin for Joomla, as WP can now pretty much do EVERYTHING Joomla does, but better. Love the simplicity of this plugin!” Sam, Web Contempo
”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 an education services provider, presenter, show promoter, or event management professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow and improve the experience of your customers.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its users confirm:
”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
Event Espresso provides robust support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to organize and manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you may want to consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This edition allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition allows you to install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license lets you run Event Espresso on five sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a specific use-case, or to report errors and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of event promoters.
If you own a WordPress web site and you intend to run events that involve managing dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Software
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