Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as workshops, community courses, charity fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event such as a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complex process. You will probably need to manage scheduling, dates, participant numbers, data collection and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to participants.
There are many advantages 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 recurring events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily create an event and start accepting registrations literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to enable future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software 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 this plugin.
Learn more 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:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating event attendees to enroll by themselves.
Letting your attendees to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more energy on delivering a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy optional add ons only when you need additional features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event signups 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite other people they know who may also be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process can be transacted wholly in digital form, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Data. You own all the data you obtain from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to end-users through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can buy for an additional 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 set up. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you gather unique data using a custom event registration form on your web pages to prepare a great experience for your attendees.
- Customized Notification Email Message. Set up automated registration and payment notification emails to communicate with your attendees.
- Tax Admin And Reporting. Event Espresso 4 provides several ways to manage taxes for an event and report tax fee components to customers when purchasing tickets. You can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and display attendee details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing for the system-default ticket.
- Promotional Codes. Leverage promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage visitors to take action without hesitation, or make your events more appealing for others. Also useful for helping to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event attendees when they show up, or sending in paper registration forms for manual registration later.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can join a waiting list if your event has become sold out. You can also specify that wait-list members pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Private Contact Notes. Keep comments about a contact on their profile. Private notes lets you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve helped your contacts.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build your event at your own leisure without publishing it to your site. You can work on your events until you are ready to publish it to your website, or schedule to publish your event pages at a later date and time.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to be used throughout Event Espresso and your WordPress themes. The organization information include: organization name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, phone, tax number, company logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Upload Events. EE 4 provides an advanced importing capability that allows you to import a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import details about events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Event Attendee. EE 4 allows a single person or an organization to register multiple participants at once. Event managers can control how many people are able to enroll in one registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you engage with a community of experienced event managers, web developers, designers, online marketers and business owners who also use the software. You can network with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions 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 profile information such as staff member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Accurate Participant Management. You have control of your attendees’ date; who has registered, for what event and what amount they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your event registrants on a person-by-person basis or all at once.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 allows for more complex enhancements and customizations to the application.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for normal site traffic when you need to make changes on your site. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: According to the mission statement on their web site, Event Espresso’s objective 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 company operates on a modular and effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the work of re-entering event information when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to tickets).
- Default payment status.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the functionality of your event management process.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Grid Template Add-on: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If the event does not have a featured image available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a drop-down list.
- 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 be customized to show the event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your 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 Files Addon: The Custom Files add-on lets you bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add-on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add on lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add-on lets you manage the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration addon gives your potential attendees the ability to register for 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 Multi-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.
- Events Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template add on provides you with an easy-to-use system that lets you change 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 web developers design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp addon lets you auto-register attendees to a chosen autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
User Feedback
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”EventEspresso saves us money, saves our secretary 16-24 hours and looks so professionally done that people ask us how we do it; which we happily tell them, “Event Espresso, and be sure to get the ticketing add-on.”” David, House of Prayer
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”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
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, workshop planner, or event consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the user forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your event participants.
Product Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as so many of its plugin customers confirm:
”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 software provides amazing support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, premium 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress 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 Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you need to consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This license option allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license enables you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This 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.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your specific situation, or to report bugs and share feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you intend to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues, enrolling participants, or selling seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
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