Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as workshops, group classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, social functions, or even a large-scale event like a music festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complicated and time-consuming process. You need to manage calendar schedules, available dates and seating, attendee numbers, data collection, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily reproduce repeat 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 costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based website or blog, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily schedule your event and start accepting bookings in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the plugin has been redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of using the plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into a feature-rich and professional 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 an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are enabling attendees to perform the registration by themselves.
Letting your customers to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you focus more of your energy on delivering a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase addons only when you need new features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event registrations 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process remains entirely online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information collected from event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users via standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great features to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from a single event.
- Customized Confirmation Emails. Configure automatic registration and payment notification emails to communicate with your attendees.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, enabling you to collect registration payments prior to running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to customize the display settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details sections.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly by pre-configuring default prices.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event attendees at the door, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual registration later.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached maximum capacity. Additionally, you can specify that wait-listed registrants pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of interaction to your events pages by allowing potential attendees to interact with you online via commenting and previous participants to post reviews that can help others consider whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for public commenting are specified using the WordPress commenting section.
- Optimized For The Most Recent WP Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build visually attractive event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to be used throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. The organization information include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, primary contact email address, phone, tax number, your logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Data. You can output all the data collected from event customers into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, planning new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WordPress WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WordPress WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily insert graphic images and format your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post.
- One-Click Plugin Updating. Event Espresso offers easy 1-click software updates to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Staff Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in your event description.
- Event Reporting. Event reports provides you with information of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over your content and how your information displays to prospective customers.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for normal site visitors when you need to perform maintenance on your site. You can still work on your content during maintenance mode.
- 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 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 includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes customer data in emails and email updates.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to significantly expand the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display all scheduled events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events manager add on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of these 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 also be customized to display an event thumbnail image instead of a date.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your site uses 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 events in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Editions: This add on lets you involve staff in the event management process and give new users the capacity 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 privileges, so your staff can help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas 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.
- Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at the venue 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Add on: This addon uses the WordPress calendar to display events and event categories via an attractive graphical calendar.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software 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 Event Espresso powered website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
Testimonials
Here are a few of the testimonials that 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
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
”Just bought an Event Espresso license for an upcoming conference website we are working on. The custom registration forms functionality rocks!” Eric Sopp, Inside Design
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, workshop planner, or event professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the support forum for new ideas and practical ways to improve your event management process and improve the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as so many of its plugin end-users attest:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
Event Espresso provides amazing support including 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 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 organize and manage your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider using one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This option allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license option lets you install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 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 is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds 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.
Use the plugin’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of event managers.
If you own a WordPress website and you intend to run an event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, and/or booking seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
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