Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require bookings, such as seminars, community courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a big event like a trade exhibit, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a complex and time-consuming process. You will most likely have to manage scheduling, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data processing, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give you more control, create a better user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily schedule an event and start accepting online registrations literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Customize event registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 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 and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Automated Event Registration Management
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 emails, to seating capacity 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 virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling participants to perform the registration on their own.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you focus more of your resources on planning a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a third party service provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy optional add ons only when you need new features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event bookings outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can be performed wholly online, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information collected from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users through standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great built-in to site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure multiple ticket types and specify different prices, maximum number of tickets, etc.
- Event Calendar. Participants can easily see your events and add these to their schedule using the WordPress calendar.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to registrants so they can purchase the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to customize the settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow you to create new prices that adjust the default ticket price of the default ticket.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with three comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event registrants and check in everyone who attends.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Control who can and cannot attend your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social interactivity to your events by encouraging potential attendees to interact with you online via commenting and previous attendees to post feedback that can help others choose whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for commenting are specified in the WordPress native commenting admin area.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to develop your event over multiple work sessions without publishing it to your website. You can keep working on your event pages until you are ready to take things live, or schedule your event pages to publish at a later date and time.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is being translated into more than 15 languages, and more translations are being added all the time.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can easily set up as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by checking a box.
- Venue Manager. The venue manager in EE 4 allows information about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform potential registrants of your event’s location. The venue profile has many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue details such as venue seating capacity, venue website, venue phone number, venue location details, Google map, etc. You can also display venues in different areas of your WP theme as well as on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Automatic Software Upgrades. Event Espresso provides simple 1-click updating to ensure that you have the latest features and to keep your plugin installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event attendees who have not made payment for their admission with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will reference registered customers who have not paid their registration in full by name, give them the balance they owe, and include links to the event, a payment link and a url to download the invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can even customize your page templates to display events in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for general users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 enables more complex enhancements and customizations to the plugin.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for normal site traffic whenever site maintenance is needed. You can continue to work on your content during maintenance mode.
- 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 mission, the company operates on 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 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes customer data in confirmation emails and updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a series of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to significantly expand the capabilities of your event management process.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display all scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events manager add-on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to browse for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you 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 prices when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site will have access to your special events. Members can also input personal data into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Users can also view past events and pay for future events.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart addon is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives potential customers the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their cart. With the Multi-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 View Template Add on: The Events Table Template addon 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 enables developers to build their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- JSON API Addon: The new Event Espresso JSON API add on allows other applications, websites, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
Testimonials
Below are a few of the testimonials that plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”I want to commend you on a fabulous product which is just the right price for a small non-profit. People are happy with the registration process, as are we! …Thank you SO much for a great product.” Sandra Forero Bush, World Trade Center Tacoma
”Customizing an Event Registration plugin for WordPress by @EventEspresso. Love the pro version. Highly Recommended!” Joshua Garity
”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
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, show planner, or event management professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, spend a little time researching the user forum for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as many of its satisfied plugin customers 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 robust support with access to support forums, comprehensive 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to run and manage your events.
Event Espresso Cost
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you should consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This option enables you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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 to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about problems and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that require managing dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and/or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager System
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