Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as workshops, training classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, networking events, or even a big event like an arts & crafts, 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 complex process. You may need to co-ordinate scheduling, dates, participant numbers, data processing and storage, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily reproduce previous events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting online registrations in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the 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 a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing options 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 improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations and sign-ups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating event participants to enrol on their own.
Allowing your attendees to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you spend more of your resources on delivering a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy addons only when you need new functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online bookings 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can remain entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Data. You own all the data you collect from your event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to users through standard features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Ready to use in very little time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
- Custom Notification Emails. Easily configure custom automatic registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with your registrants.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants and let them purchase the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to customize the look and control settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly and easily by pre-configuring default ticket prices.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event participants when they show up, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual inputting later.
- Ticketless Events. Set up events without making it necessary for registrants to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any form of event, not only when tickets are needed.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Record observations about a contact on their profile. Private commenting helps you keep a record of when event participants contacted you, your internal comments, and how you’ve assisted your contacts.
- Search Engine Friendly URLs. Keyword-rich Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly urls that have relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you get a more targeted audience to your events.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is is available in 15+ languages, and more are being added all the time.
- Upload Events. EE 4 provides an advanced importing feature that lets you upload a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload information about events, datetimes, tickets, prices, registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows details about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform site visitors 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 lets you reuse details such as venue seating capacity, venue website, phone number, physical and/or virtual location, maps, etc. You can also list all of your venues in specific sections in your theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a specific venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso gives you access to an expert community of event managers and other plugin users. You can engage with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Member Management. Save time and keep your business organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Attendee Reports. Event reporting provides you with data of the registrations and transactions, enabling you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and how much money you’ve collected.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for most WP users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 allows for more complex enhancements and customizations to the software.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for regular website traffic whenever you need to make updates on your site. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their site, Event Espresso’s goal is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their objectives, the software has been built using a modular and highly 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 comes with over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes participant data in emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the capabilities of your event management system.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display upcoming events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking a category name shows the events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files add-on lets you bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Editions: This addon lets you include other users in the event management process and give new users permission 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 privileges, so others can 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 parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives your potential customers the ability to register for 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 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 Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template addon provides event managers with an easy-to-use system that allows you to 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 developers build custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin addon, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track registrations, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Here are some of the testimonials that users have written about Event Espresso:
“It is a very, very slick plugin. It’s one of those plugins where you install it, change a couple of settings, and boom you’re selling tickets.” Brad Williams, WebDevStudios
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, festival planner, or event management professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time researching the support forum for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its end-users confirm:
“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
The Event Espresso plugin provides amazing support with 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you need to consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This option lets you install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This license option allows you to set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds 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.
Use the plugin’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run an event that requires managing dates, times and venues, booking participants, and selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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