Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as seminars, training courses, charity fund raisers, corporate events, or even a large-scale event such as an arts & crafts, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complex and time-consuming process. You will most likely have to manage calendar schedules, event dates, attendee numbers, data administration, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for similar events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily schedule multiple events and begin accepting bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
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 Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it is being redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
More info:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to perform the registration themselves.
Allowing your customers to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more of your time on planning a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service provider. The cost is kept low through a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional add ons when you need new functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event sign-ups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite their friends who may be interested.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process can remain wholly online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you obtain from your event participants.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users via standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can gather unique information using a custom event registration form on your website to create a tailored experience for your users.
- Custom Notification Emails. Easily configure custom automated registration and payment notification emails to communicate with event customers.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to prospects and let them choose the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary attendee’s registration information for any additional registrants.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily by pre-configuring system-default ticket pricing.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track all attendees.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of participants and check in everyone who attends.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and can’t register for your events.
- Private Contact Notes. Keep notes about contacts on their profile and how you’ve interacted with them. Private notes enables you to keep records of when event registrants contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have interacted with them.
- Works With The Most Up-To-Date Version Of WP. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build beautiful event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of all aspects of your event’s registration and ticketing, and also allows you to automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, customizable event page designs, payment processing, list waiting, limits on attendees, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for many of your events, you can easily set up as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WordPress WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily add graphic images and format your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage your attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily within reach.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your website visitors can help increase exposure for your events using social media sharing buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have multiple types of events like free and paid, conference speakers and breakout sessions, different kinds of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize these to help event registrants to locate what they’re looking for. You can list all the events in a category on a custom event category page, make the events searchable by category, and color-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, as well as suggesting other events in the categories that appeal to your existing customers.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web developers to have more control and options over the content of your event page and how the information displays to site visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registrations for normal site visitors whenever you need to carry out maintenance on your site. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And 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 goals, the company operates on 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 provides you with 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow software users to further expand the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display the upcoming events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking on a category name displays all events related to that category and closes 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 lets your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files add on lets you override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: This add on lets you include staff 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 WordPress users roles and allow them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing staff to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Attendees 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Addon: This addon uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add-on: The MailChimp add-on lets you auto-register participants to a chosen autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Here are a few of the testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is so easy to use yet feature rich and stable. It is a cornerstone of our site and our success.” Fraser Barner, Speaker’s Lab
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”I’m so excited to fire Eventbrite! Event Espresso has an amazing WP plugin for event management. We’re testing it now & are very impressed! In a nutshell Event Espresso saves us money & does everything Eventbrite did before. :)” Dustin Nay
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, concert promoter, or event management professional, there are just unlimited 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 visiting the user forum for new ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its plugin users attest:
”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
The plugin provides amazing support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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 an established team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license option allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This license option allows you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons 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 specials being offered. Presently, the software is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. 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 setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to report problems and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WordPress website owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that involve managing dates and venues, booking attendees, and selling seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration Plugin
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