Do you currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings or registrations, such as seminars, group courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, networking events, or even a large-scale event such as 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 sign-ups can be a complex process. You will probably need to manage scheduling, event dates, participant numbers, data processing and storage, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event participants.
There are many benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin processing online bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ various event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating 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 event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the software is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of using the plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages 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 existing website or blog into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to enroll themselves.
Letting your customers to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more of your energy on organizing a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase addons only if you need extra features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online event sign-ups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite other people they know who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process is transacted entirely in digital form, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the data collected from event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that customers can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your events and add these to their schedule using a WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments prior to running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to configure the display of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing of the system-default ticket.
- Discount And Promotional Codes. You can leverage promotion and multiple discount codes to encourage people to make a decision without hesitation, or make your offerings more affordable for others. This is also practical if you want to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees at the door, or sending in paper-based forms for manual inputting later.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. Additionally, you can specify that wait-listed members pre-pay if you plan to expand numbers for your event.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential registrants to interact with you online via commenting and past participants to post reviews that can help others decide whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for public comments are specified in the WP commenting settings.
- Works With The Latest Version Of WP. The EE 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you create highly aesthetic event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to be used throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Your organization information include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email address, phone, VAT/tax number, company logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating similar tickets for many of your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager feature in Event Espresso 4 allows information about venues to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue record displays many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays details such as venue capacity, venue web address, phone number, physical, location map, etc. You can also display venue profiles in specific areas of your WordPress theme as well as on a venue archive 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 given venue.
- Attendee Records. Manage each registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized and easily within reach.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and site visitors can help promote your event using social share buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have multiple types of events like free and paid, workshops and mastermind sessions, different kinds of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize these to make it easier for your attendees to find what they’re looking for. You can list all events in a category on a custom event category page, make events searchable by category, and colour-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, in addition to suggesting other events in the categories that appeal to your visitors.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how the information displays to visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for regular website visitors when you need to perform maintenance on your website. You can still work on your event pages 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 objectives, the company operates on a modular and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes registrant data in confirmation emails and email updates.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a comprehensive range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to further enhance the functionality of the event management process.
Some of these addons 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 available, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events management add on enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you need. 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 lets your users to browse for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon comes free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your events in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This add on lets you involve others in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, 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 sections 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.
- 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 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 add on, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- Events Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template add on gives you an easy-to-use system that allows you to 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 allows developers to build custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- 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 registrant data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Here are a few of the testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! 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 (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, seminar planner, or event professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the user forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow or improve the experience of your event customers.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and WP themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as many of its clients confirm:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
The Event Espresso software provides incredible support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, one-on-one 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 a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you should consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This edition allows you to set up Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the plugin sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about bugs and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of WP website owners.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you intend to run any event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, and booking seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin
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