Do you currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings, such as workshops, group courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, marketing conferences, or even a big event like a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complex and time-consuming process. You will probably have to co-ordinate scheduling, availability, attendee numbers, data processing and storage, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for previously-run events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event booking system can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based site, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create an event and begin receiving online bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being revamped using a different structure to enable future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some 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 website or blog into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling attendees to enrol on their own.
Allowing your participants to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you focus more of your resources on delivering a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a 3rd party service provider. This is made possible through a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy add ons only when you need additional functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event signups 24 hours a day. In addition, 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 in attending.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process remains entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information collected from your event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Be up and running in no time.
- Customized Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you collect specific information using a custom event registration form on your website to plan a unique experience for your clients.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Easily configure automated booking and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with your clients.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants so they can purchase the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WP theme and display venue details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the base ticket price for your system-default ticket.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 includes 3 detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you know who your clients are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event has reached maximum attendance. Additionally, you can specify that waiting list attendees pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Private Contact Commenting. Keep comments about a contact on their profile. Private notes enables you to keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve helped them.
- Optimized For The Latest Version Of WordPress. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build beautiful event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used to promote your events, such as currency name, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Exportable Data. You can export all of your information gathered from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for compiling advanced reports, implementing marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Multiple Attendee Registration. EE 4 allows an individual or people to enroll multiple attendees simultaneously. Event managers control how many people can enrol in a single registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, web developers, web designers, internet marketers and business owners who also use the software. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community through their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and website visitors can help spread the word about your event using social sharing buttons.
- Accurate Event Participant Manager. You have control of your attendees’ records; who has registered, which event they have registered for and how much they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of attendees to a spreadsheet for additional uses, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your clients on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over the content of your event page and how your information displays to your prospective customers.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular site visitors when website maintenance is required. You can still work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy 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 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 includes 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during the registration process.
Addons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to further expand the functionality of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display upcoming events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template displays categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name displays the events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your website 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 Template Add-on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your event lists in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Editions: This add-on lets you include other users in your organization to help manage your events 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 WP users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing staff to help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts 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 And Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add on adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at the door. People can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Addon: This add-on uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events via a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API addon enables other software applications, web tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have written 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
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”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
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, conference planner, or event management professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time going through the user forum for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great customer support, as many of its customers 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 great support with access to support forums, in-depth 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to organize and manage your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider using one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This license option enables you to configure Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current 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 Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about problems and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run events that involve managing dates and venues, registering participants, and/or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
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