Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as workshops, training classes, non-profit fund-raisers, social events, or even a large-scale event like a music concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You may have to co-ordinate scheduling, availability, registration numbers, data entry, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event registrants.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily replicate previous events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based web site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily schedule your event and begin processing registrations in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The Event Espresso 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 read more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to perform the registration themselves.
Letting your participants to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you spend more of your resources on planning a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a 3rd-party service provider. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase optional add-ons when you need additional features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online signups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite other people they know who may also be interested.
- Green Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process is performed wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data you collect from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique built-in to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration. Event Espresso lets you gather specific data using custom event registration forms on your site to plan a tailored experience for your event participants.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Match your website’s design for your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s template options and parts, and HTML or CSS.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of options to administer taxes for your event and report tax fee components to customers when purchasing tickets. You can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse venue details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing of your default ticket.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. Offer promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage visitors to take action now, or simply make your events more affordable for others. Also useful if you want to sell-out events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has become sold out. Additionally, you can make it a requirement waiting list registrants pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- XML RSS Feeds. Keep your blog readers up-to-date about your events, drive quality traffic and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Latest Version Of WordPress. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build highly aesthetic event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Multi-Language Software. Event Espresso is being translated into 15+ languages, with more languages planned.
- Bulk Import Events. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing capability that lets you quickly upload bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, tickets, prices, custom registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Venue Profiles. The venue management feature in EE 4 allows details about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform site visitors of the location of your event. The venue record has many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays venue information like venue seating capacity, venue web address, venue phone number, physical and/or virtual location, map, etc. You can also list all of your venues on specific sections in your theme and on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a particular venue.
- 1-Click Updates. Event Espresso offers easy one-click software upgrading to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your plugin installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential participants who have not made payment for their booking with a standard but personalized invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address pre-registered participants who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the amount owing, and include links to the event details, a payment url and a link where they can download the invoice.
- Accurate Participant Manager. You have control of your attendees’ information; who has registered, which event they have booked and how much they 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 an attendee list to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your attendees individually or as a group.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how your information displays to your readers.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for normal site visitors whenever site maintenance is needed. You can continue to work on your content during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their web site, Event Espresso’s aim 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 software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the work of re-entering event information when adding new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a series of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Add ons
As well as a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow software users to further expand the functionality of your event management system.
Some of these add-ons 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 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a dropdown 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 also be customized to display an event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your website is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to your special events. Members can also add personal data into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also look up past events and pay for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This add-on lets you include others 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 privileges, so your staff can help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do 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 add on.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing add-on adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at the door. Registrants 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 Addon: The Events Table Template add on provides event managers with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to edit the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also allows web developers to build custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- JSON API Add-on: The Event Espresso JSON API add on enables other software applications, online tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Users – Feedback
Here are just some of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users have written 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
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”I am in love with your product, I work with many educational institutions that hold classes/events and I will definitely recommend this to all of them, the only time I have seen a system this comprehensive and sophisticated is when an organization I worked with paid a programmer nearly $8,000 for a custom solution, and yet still there are features in your registration system that his didn’t have. Thank you so much for your help and patience.” Abdullah J.
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, show promoter, 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, go through the support forum for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process or improve the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as many of its satisfied plugin users confirm:
”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 exceptional support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email support and even a monthly VIP member pass giving 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 solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you should consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This license lets you 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 License Edition – This license option allows you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the plugin sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
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 documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to a particular situation, or to report bugs and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues, registering attendees, and reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration Software
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