Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need managing registrations, such as workshops, group classes, not-for-profit fund-raisers, social events, or even a big event like a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a time-consuming process. You have to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, participant numbers, data administration, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event 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 reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give you more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can easily install a very inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create an event and begin accepting online registrations in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and email marketing tools.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been revamped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of using the plugin.
More info:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into an automated and fully featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for attendees to register by themselves.
Letting your clients to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you focus more of your energy on creating a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a third party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add-ons when you need extra features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new signups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with other people they know who may be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process remains wholly online, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data obtained from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users via standard features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), which these can be managed from one single event.
- Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule using the WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, enabling you to collect money prior to running your events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and display events details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the default ticket price of the system-default ticket.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 includes three useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event participants and check-in everyone who attends.
- Ticketless Events. Promote events without the requirement for participants to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all kinds of events, not only when tickets are required.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential attendees to interact with you online via commenting and past customers to post reviews that can help others choose whether or not to register. Moderation settings for commenting are configured via the WP commenting system.
- SEO Friendly URLs. Keyword-rich Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly permalinks with relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you drive more visitors to your site.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Organization data include: organization name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, phone number, tax number, your logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for your events, you can easily set up as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets information about a venue to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform users of the location of your event. The venue record has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue details such as venue seating capacity, venue site URL, phone number, physical and virtual location, maps, etc. You can also list venues in specific parts on your WordPress theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a particular venue.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage your registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily within reach.
- Staff Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have multiple event types such as free and paid, workshops and mastermind sessions, different types of courses, etc. you can categorize them to help your participants to find what they’re searching for. You can display all events in a category on an event category page, make the events searchable by category, and color-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, in addition to suggesting other events in the categories that appeal to your existing customers.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are completely compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data which can be useful for web developers who are diagnosing software problems.
- 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 objectives, the software has been built using a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – reduces the need to re-enter event details when creating new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an incredible range of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to further expand the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these addons 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, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events manager add on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can schedule as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name shows all events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add-on lets you display your events in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Versions: This add-on lets you involve staff in the event management process and give new users the ability 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 capabilities, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas 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.
- Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing add on gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the capacity 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 venues. People 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 addon provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you 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 included templates as a base 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 addon, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track bookings, and accept payments from your website.
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 here:
User Feedback
Here are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
”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
”Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
”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
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, event planner, or event professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, go through the user forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive technical support, as many of its clients attest:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
Event Espresso provides incredible support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, custom development 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 proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to run and manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This option enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This lets you install Event Espresso on five domains. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular situation, or to notify developers about bugs and give 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 management plugin, used by thousands of event managers.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, or selling seating, then you will probably not find a better WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
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