Do you currently run or plan to run events that require bookings, such as workshops, training classes, charity fund-raisers, social functions, or even a big event like a food fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups is a complex process. You need to co-ordinate scheduling, date availability, attendee numbers, data processing and storage, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of advantages 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 event managers 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 website or blog, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software lets you easily schedule multiple events and begin receiving bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it has been revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for attendees to register by themselves.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you direct more time on delivering a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a 3rd-party service. The cost is kept low through a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add-ons only if you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new sign-ups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process can be kept entirely online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information gathered from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great features to site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. You can customize your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and components, as well as HTML and/or CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments prior to running events.
- 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 added participants.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the base ticket price for your default ticket.
- Discount Codes. Provide promotion and multiple discount codes to encourage visitors to make a buying decision immediately, or make your offerings more affordable for others. Also useful for helping to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event attendees and confirm those who attend.
- No-Ticket Events. Set up events without requiring attendees to select tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all forms of events, not just those that accept tickets.
- XML RSS Feeds. Automatically update users, bring in more visitors and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Search Engine Friendly Page URLs. Keyword rich URLs take advantage of your WP Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly urls that use relevant keywords add to the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you drive more visitors to your events.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used in your events, including currency, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Exportable Data. You can export all the data gathered from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for producing advanced reports, planning new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WordPress WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert photos and create and edit your event descriptions without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any WP post or page.
- Automatic Software Installation Upgrades. Event Espresso offers simple 1-click upgrades to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your plugin installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event attendees who have not paid yet for their enrollment with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with one click. Your invoices will address registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the balance owing, and include a link to the event, a payment url and a url to download the invoice.
- Accurate Participant Manager. You control your participants’ details; who has registered, for what event and what amount they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of event attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your registrants on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how the information displays to your site visitors.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for developers when potential problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, 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 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 version of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the need to re-enter event data when creating new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Addons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow software users to significantly expand the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these addons include:
- EE4 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 an event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays event categories as a simple list. Clicking a category name shows the events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add on comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon allows you to take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event prices when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered site users can have access to your special events. Members can also input personal information into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Users can also view previous events and make payment for new events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add-on lets you include others in the event management process and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and allow them different permissions with different capabilities, so others can help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at venues. People 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Table Template Add on: The Events Table Template add-on gives event managers a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you modify the look and feel of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also enables developers to build custom templates using one of the templates included as a base template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
User Feedback
Here are some of the testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”When you can get a company to expend more money switching systems just to use your plugin…you’ve really accomplished something.” David, House of Prayer
”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, Improve Photography
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, concert promoter, or event consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time going through the support forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management workflow and improve the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as so many of its satisfied plugin customers attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides robust support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you may want to consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This option lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This edition lets you install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license lets you configure Event Espresso on five sites. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about problems and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run any event that involves managing dates, times and venues, booking participants, and reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Plugin
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