Do you currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community courses, charity fund-raisers, corporate functions, or even a big event like a rave party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a time-consuming process. You may need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, event dates, participant numbers, data administration, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event registrants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate repeat events, give you more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can easily install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily create multiple events and begin processing online registrations literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Customize event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the software is being revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually move completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to perform the registration on their own.
Allowing your attendees to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you invest more resources on planning a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy add-ons only when you need added functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event registrations 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may also be interested.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can remain wholly in digital form, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the data you collect from event attendees.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to its users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great built-in to web site owners. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
- Customizable Event Designs. Create the look and feel you want for your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and parts, and HTML or CSS.
- Tax Admin And Reporting. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of options to administer taxes for your event and report tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. You can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to configure the settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details sections.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing of the system-default ticket.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 provides three detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you understand who your clients are and how they have done business with you.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can and can’t participate in your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of social sharing to your events by encouraging potential customers to interact with you online via commenting and previous attendees to post comments that can help others choose whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for public commenting are set in the WordPress native commenting section.
- Optimized For The Most Up-To-Date WP Version. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create beautiful event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Multi-Language Software. Event Espresso can be set up in 15+ languages, with more languages planned.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your data collected from event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, planning new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows information about venues to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform users of your event’s location. The venue profile has many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue details like venue capacity, venue site URL, venue phone number, venue location details, Google map, etc. You can also display all of your event venues in different parts on your theme and on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- 1-Click Upgrades. Event Espresso provides simple 1-click software installation updates to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your plugin installation working with new versions of WordPress.
- Staff Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in an event description.
- Accurate Event Participant Manager. You have control of your participants’ records; who has registered, for what event and what amount they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of event attendees to a CSV file for additional uses, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your customers individually or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web developers to have more control and options over your event page and how your information displays to your prospective event attendees.
- Control Box Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which brings the ability to reorganize the user interface to match your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from the page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: 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 as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to further expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template shows categories as a simple list. Clicking a category name displays the events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your web site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your events in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: 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 WordPress users roles and allow them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing staff to 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 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 addon.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives your 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 cart. With the Multiple 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 addon uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events in a nice graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Testimonials
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
“Love the plugin, we only use it once a year for a race we have in February. This saved us tons of time in data entry. In addition, we had more runners register than any other year. We attribute that to the ease of registering online. Thanks for your work.” Ed, Friends of Oscar Scherer Park
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, conference promoter, or event consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management process or improve the experience of your event attendees.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with most WP plugins and WP themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as many of its satisfied end-users attest:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
Event Espresso provides incredible support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This option allows you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This option enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This option enables you to configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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 pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about issues and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run events that require scheduling dates and venues, registering participants, and/or selling seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
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