Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community courses, not-for-profit fund raisers, marketing functions, or even a large-scale event such as a trade show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a complex and time-consuming process. You may be required to co-ordinate event schedules, date availability, attendee numbers, data entry, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of 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 similar events, give you more control, create a better user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can download and install a very inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create multiple events and begin accepting online registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details go here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into an automated and feature-rich event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are enabling event participants to perform the sign-up process by themselves.
Letting your attendees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you spend more time on planning a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service. This is made possible through a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy optional add-ons only when you need additional functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online sign-ups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process is kept entirely in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information you acquire from your event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to website owners. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Ready to use in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to set up as many types of tickets as you need and set separate pricing options, number of tickets, and more.
- Customizable Event And Registration Page Designs. You can customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and components, as well as HTML or CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with leading payment gateways, allowing you to collect booking fees prior to running events.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration details for any added attendees.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly and easily by pre-configuring default ticket prices.
- Discount Codes. Leverage promotional and discount codes to encourage visitors to take action immediately, or simply make your offers more affordable for price-sensitive customers. Also useful for helping to sell-out events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees when they show up, or sending in paper-based forms for manual inputting later.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. Additionally, you can specify that wait-list attendees pre-pay if you plan to expand numbers for your event.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Record comments about contacts on their profile and how you’ve helped them. Private commenting helps you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have assisted them.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you build an event page over time without publishing it to your website. You can keep editing your event until you are ready to go live, or schedule to publish your event at a later time and date.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your WP themes. The organization fields include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email, phone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Exportable Information. You can output all of your information collected from event participants into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, implementing marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Venue Manager. The venue management feature in EE 4 allows details about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your website to inform registrants of the location of your event. The venue profile 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 website, venue phone number, venue address, map, etc. You can also list all of your event venues in different sections in your WordPress theme as well as on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a particular venue.
- Automatic Software Installation Upgrades. Event Espresso provides easy one-click updating to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation compatible with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and site visitors can help publicize your events using social sharing buttons.
- Accurate Participant Management. You control your attendees’ information; who has enrolled, for what event and what amount they’ve 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 customizable payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your clients individually or as a group.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for most WordPress users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 allows for more complex extensions and customizations to the software.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for normal site traffic whenever you need to make updates on your site. You can continue to work on your content during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their 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 and effective 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+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes registrant data in emails and updates.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service fee to every ticket).
- Default payment status.
Add ons
In addition to a comprehensive range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow software users to significantly enhance the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display upcoming events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events manager add-on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can create as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that take place within a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your site is featured on 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 Add on: The Custom Template add on lets you display your event lists in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This addon lets you include other 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 WP users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, allowing staff to help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts 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.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing addon gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Add-on: This add on uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events in a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on allows you to auto-register participants to a particular autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are just some of the testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, festival planner, or event management professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, spend a little time visiting the forums for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its end-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
The Event Espresso plugin provides comprehensive support including access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to manage your events.
Product Licensing Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider using one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license lets you install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on five domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
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 Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a specific situation, or to notify developers about problems and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of users.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you intend to run any event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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