Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating registrations, such as seminars, group classes, not-for-profit fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event like a trade exhibit, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event sign-ups can be a complex process. You will most likely need to manage event schedules, date availability, registration numbers, data collection, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event attendees.
There are many 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 replicate recurring events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered website, you can easily install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily set up an event and start receiving bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate 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 retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into an automated and fully featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling attendees to register themselves.
Allowing your participants to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you concentrate more resources on delivering a more enjoyable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept low through a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy optional add-ons only when you need new functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event bookings 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can be conducted wholly online, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information you collect from your event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to its users through standard features (these come with the software) and additional features that customers can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great built-in to web site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you create as many types of tickets as you want and specify prices, limits on ticket quantities, and more.
- Custom Notification Emails. Set up automated booking and payment confirmation emails to communicate with your clients.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to registrants and let them choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to customize the look and control settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Create events fast with pre-configured system-default ticket pricing.
- Discount Codes. Set up promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage visitors to register immediately, or simply make your offerings more appealing for others. This is also practical for helping to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to know who your clients are and how they have done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event is full. You can also specify that wait-list members pre-pay if you plan to expand numbers for your event.
- RSS Feeds. Automatically update blog readers, bring in more visitors and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Latest WordPress Version. 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.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in full control of every aspect of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and lets you automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, custom event page designs, payment processing, wait lists, limits on attendees, print-ready tickets and more.
- Upload Event Information. Event Espresso 4 provides an advanced importing capability that enables you to quickly upload bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, tickets, prices, custom registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WP WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily add images and stylize your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post or page.
- Registrant Records. Manage each attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily within reach.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event clients who have not made payment for their admission with a standard but personalized invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will address registered participants who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the balance owing, and include links to the event, a payment link and a link where they can download a PDF invoice.
- Transaction Reports. Quick-view event reports gives you data of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over your content and how the information displays to your readers.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers who are diagnosing software errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And 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 objectives, the software has been built using 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 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display upcoming events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can create as many events in advance as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to browse for events that take place within a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add on lets you display your event lists in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add on Editions: This add-on lets you include other users 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 WP users roles and assign them different permissions with different privileges, allowing staff to help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain areas 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 add on.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: 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 addon, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- EE4 Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add-on gives you an 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 lets developers design custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API add-on gives permission for other software applications, web sites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso information through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
Testimonials
Here are some of the many great testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is so easy to use yet feature rich and stable. It is a cornerstone of our site and our success.” Fraser Barner, Speaker’s Lab
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & 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.
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, show planner, or event management consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, visit the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management process or enhance the experience of your participants.
Product Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent customer support, as so many of its satisfied 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
Event Espresso provides robust support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, custom development 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 an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to run your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you will want to consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This license option allows you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This lets you install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a specific use-case, or to report bugs and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates, times and venues, booking attendees, or booking seating, then you will probably not find a better WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
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