Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as seminars, training courses, charity fundraisers, corporate conferences, or even a large-scale event like a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event bookings can be a complex and time-consuming process. You will most likely need to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and spaces, attendee numbers, data administration, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to participants.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate similar events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can set up an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule your event and begin processing online registrations in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
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 Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the software is being rebuilt 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 retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for participants to enroll themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more of your time on organizing a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party provider. This is made possible by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy add ons when you need additional functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online signups outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process is kept wholly online, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the data collected from your event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to end-users through built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to web site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Ready to use in no time.
- Customized Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can collect specific data using a custom event registration form on your website to plan a great experience for your clients.
- Customizable Event Designs. Customize your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and components, as well as HTML and CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospective registrants so they can choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration details for any added attendees.
- Default Prices. Create events fast by pre-configuring system-default ticket prices.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. You can leverage promotional and multiple discount codes to incentivize visitors to make a decision without hesitation, or make your offers more appealing for others. This is also practical for helping to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event attendees when they show up, or send in paper forms for manual registration later.
- No Ticket Events. List events without making it necessary for registrants to book tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any kind of event, not only those that need tickets.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential customers to ask questions about your event and previous customers to post comments that can help others consider whether or not to register. Moderation settings for commenting are set up in the WP built-in commenting settings.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events enable you to build your event page over time without publishing it to your website. You can work on your event until you are ready to publish it on your site, or schedule to publish your event at a future date and time.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency name, currency symbols, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Bulk Edit Events. EE 4 provides an advanced importing feature that lets you easily import bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, ticketing details, prices, custom registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WordPress Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert graphic images and format your event descriptions without having to know HTML or CSS, just like any WP post.
- Automatic Updating. Event Espresso provides simple 1-click plugin installation updating to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation working with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential customers who have not fully paid for their enrollment with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will reference pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration in full by name, give them the amount owing, and include links to the event information, a payment url and a url to download a PDF invoice.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different types of events like free and paid, conference speakers and breakout sessions, different kinds of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize them to make it easier for event attendees to find what they’re searching for. You can list all events in a category on a custom event category page, make events searchable by category, and color-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, as well as suggesting other events in the categories that appeal to your visitors.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for most users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 enables more complex enhancements and customizations to the application.
- Control Box Management And Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to organize the user interface to match your workflow process. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely removed from your workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: According to the mission statement on their site, 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 mission, the company operates on 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+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes customer data in confirmation emails and updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow you to further enhance the functionality of the event management system.
Some of these add-ons 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 the event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- 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 show the event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media addon 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 Addon: The Custom Template addon can display your events in a range of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: This add-on lets you involve staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity 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, 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 areas 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 Addon: The Ticketing add on adds the capacity to create 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 handling check-in scans at the door. Attendees 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.
- Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on provides event managers with an 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 their own custom templates using one of the templates included as a base template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and marketing plugin 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 Event Espresso powered website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
Customers – Testimonials
Here are some of the many testimonials that customers have posted 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
“I just completed my first event using Event Espresso. I really believe without Event Espresso my event would not have been the success it was.” Cathy Earle, Women Only Weekend
”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 a motivational speaker, presenter, festival planner, or event consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the user forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress coding guidelines. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as so many of its plugin users confirm:
”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
The software provides exceptional support including 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 an established 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 various editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This license lets you run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license option enables you to configure Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 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. When we last checked, the software retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to report issues and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands.
If you own a WordPress web site and you plan to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Plugin For WordPress
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