Do you currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings or registrations, such as workshops, group classes, non-profit fundraisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event such as a trade show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You need to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data collection, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give you more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can set up an inexpensive and professional web-based event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily schedule an event and start accepting online registrations literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are facilitating event participants to complete the enrolment process on their own.
Allowing your enrollees to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more of your time on delivering a more enjoyable event.
More 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 customers to experience.
Some additional benefits include:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service. This is made possible by using a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add ons only when you need added features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new sign-ups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and addons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can remain wholly in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you collect from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers through standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that users can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great features to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you collect specific information using custom event registration forms on your web site to prepare a great experience for your customers.
- Custom Confirmation Email Message. Configure automatic registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with event clients.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects and let them purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows event managers to customize the display settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily with pre-configured system-default ticket pricing.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 includes three detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event participants at the door, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual submission later.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and cannot attend your events.
- Private Contact Commenting. Keep observations about a contact on their profile. Private notes helps you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you’ve interacted with your customers.
- Keyword Rich URLs. Keyword rich Web links take advantage of your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” web links with relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you get more potential customers to your site.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is being translated into more than 15 languages, with more translations planned.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your information collected from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for creating reports, implementing marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets details about venues to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your website to inform users of the location of your event. The venue profile has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays venue details such as venue capacity, venue web address, venue phone number, venue address, Google map, etc. You can also list venues on specific locations in your theme as well as on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a specific venue.
- One-Click Software Installation Upgrades. Event Espresso provides simple 1-click software installation upgrades to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your plugin installation compatible with new versions of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event participants who have not fully paid for their booking with a standard but personalized invoice with one click. Your invoices will reference pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the amount they owe, and include links to the event information, a payment url and a url where they can download a PDF invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can also customize the templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for basic WordPress users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), Event Espresso 4 enables more complex extensions and customizations to the application.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for developers who are troubleshooting.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 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 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow plugin users to further enhance the capabilities of the event management process.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Grid Template Addon: 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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events manager add on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can create as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations 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 be customized to display the event thumbnail 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.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to these special events. Members can also input personal data into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also look up event history and pay for new events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This add on lets you include other 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 assign 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 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 create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- Multi-Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives your potential attendees 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 cart. With the Multiple 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 gives you an easy-to-use system that allows you to modify 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 build custom templates using one of the included templates as a source 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 add on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track bookings, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
User Testimonials
Here are some of the testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”It’s been very comprehensive and covers exactly the aspects of event registration that we needed for our site plus some features that we didn’t even need but could still use in the future. Very Excellent Plugin!” Tristan Hall, Area 12:2 Youth Group
”I recently downloaded it to add to a nonprofit site for a Boy Scout troop and the features work wonderfully with what we wanted to accomplish for the site. It allows us to set up calendar, events, and even take payments for trips. At first, I thought that it would be overkill for such a small site, but now I see the possibilities and will definitely be offering Event Espresso to my clients that need an event organization system for their web sites.” Lucy Conn, Troop 462
”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
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, festival planner, or event professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your customers.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP development rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its plugin end-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 Event Espresso software provides great support with access to support forums, 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 developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you need to consider downloading one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This lets you run Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This lets you configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license lets you run Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Plugin For WordPress
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.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about issues and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of WP site owners.
If you own a WordPress website and you intend to run events that involve managing dates, times and venues, enrolling attendees, and/or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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