Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating registrations, such as workshops, group courses, non-profit fundraisers, corporate conferences, or even a big event such as a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event sign-ups can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You need to manage scheduling, availability, participant numbers, data collection and storage, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily replicate previously-run events, give you more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can set up an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up your event and begin processing online registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for attendees to enrol themselves.
Letting your clients to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you direct more of your attention on creating a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase addons when you need new features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new event sign-ups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may also be interested.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can be kept wholly in digital form, reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information acquired from event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to its users via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique features to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you collect specific information using a custom event registration form on your site to prepare a tailored experience for your users.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Easily configure automatic registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with your customers.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you several ways to manage taxes for an event and report tax fees to registrants who purchase tickets. You can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to customize the settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details sections.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily with pre-configured default ticket pricing.
- Promotional Codes. Set up promotional and discount codes to incentivize prospects to register without hesitation, or make your offerings more attractive for price-sensitive prospects. Also useful if you want to sell out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to know who your customers are and how you have done past business with your customers. Your Contact Profile section stores the name, biography, contact details, event registration data, comments, etc. about each client.
- No Ticket Events. You can list events without making it necessary for registrants to select tickets. Use Event Espresso for any form of event, not just those that accept tickets.
- Private Comments On Contacts. Keep observations about users on their profile and how you have helped them. Private commenting helps you keep records of when event attendees contacted you, your internal observations, and how you have interacted with them.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you develop your event page in your own time-frame without displaying it live on your website. You can continue editing your event pages until you are ready to go live, or schedule to publish your event at a future date and time.
- Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Exportable Information. You can export all the data collected from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for compiling reports, planning new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Register Multiple Event Attendees. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or an organization to pay for multiple tickets and different types of tickets at the same time. You specify how many people are allowed to enroll in a single registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you interact with a community of experienced event managers, web developers, web designers, internet marketers and business owners who also use the plugin. You can interact with other members of the Event Espresso community via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in an event description.
- Accurate Event Participant Management. You have control of your attendees’ information; who has registered, for what event and what amount they paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your registrants on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are completely compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to match your workflow processes. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from your page.
- 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 and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes attendee data in notification emails and email newsletters.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow plugin users to significantly enhance the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display the scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events manager add on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of your 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 an event thumbnail instead of the date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your web 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 Files Addon: The Custom Files addon provides PHP files that let you override certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Versions: This add-on lets you include staff in the event management process 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 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 parts of your WordPress 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.
- 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 bar code 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 barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add on gives you a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to 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 developers build custom templates using one of the templates included as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp add on allows you to automatically register attendees to a selected mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
Customers – Feedback
Here are just some of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, workshop planner, or event management consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, visit the forums for tips and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as many of its end-users attest:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
Event Espresso provides incredible support including access to a support forum, in-depth 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.
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 plugin you can depend on to run your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license option allows you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This option lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to report problems and share feedback.
For detailed 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 registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP site owners.
If you own a WordPress site and you intend to run events that involve managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Software
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