Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require registrations, such as seminars, training classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, marketing events, or even a big event like a 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 complex and time-consuming process. You may need to manage scheduling, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create an event and begin processing registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the plugin is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
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 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 chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for attendees to enrol on their own.
Letting your clients to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you spend more of your energy on planning a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Reduced 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. This is made possible by using a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy addons only when you need additional functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online registrations any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite their friends who may also be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can be transacted entirely in digital form, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the data you collect from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that users can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to website owners. Here are just some:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using a WordPress calendar.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides several options to manage taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to customers when purchasing tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to customize the look and control settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details sections.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly and easily by pre-configuring default ticket pricing.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with 3 detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event registrants and confirm those who have attended.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can attend your events.
- Private Contact Notes. Keep comments about a contact on their profile and how you’ve interacted with your contacts. Private notes helps you keep a record of when event attendees contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have helped your contacts.
- Search Engine Friendly URLs. Keyword-rich Web links take advantage of your WP Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly permalinks with topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your content and improves your search rankings, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your site.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in full control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and also lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event page designs, payment processing, wait lists, attendee limits, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Upload Events. EE 4 provides an advanced importing capability that enables you to quickly upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- WordPress WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WP WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert graphic images and stylize your content without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any other WordPress post or page.
- Automatic Upgrades. Event Espresso offers easy one-click software installation updating to make sure that you have the latest features and to keep your plugin installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential clients who have not fully paid for their enrollment with a standard but personalized invoice with one click. Your invoices will reference pre-registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the balance owing, and include a link to the event, a payment url and a url to download a PDF 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 also customize the page templates to display events in your own custom way.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are fully compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Metabox Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which brings the ability to organize the user interface to suit your workflow processes. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely removed from the page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the mission statement on their website, 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 company operates on a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the need to re-enter event details when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Add ons
As well as an incredible number of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to significantly enhance the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- EE4 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 an event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management addon enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years 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 of your recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows event categories in a simple list. Clicking on a category name displays the events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add on is included free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files addon provides PHP files that let you override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add-on 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 lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to every seat.
- Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing add on gives you the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This add on uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events in a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp addon lets you automatically register attendees to a selected mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Here are some of the many testimonials that satisfied users have written 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
”This really is a hell of a plugin. For me, it’s probably the final nail in the coffin for Joomla, as WP can now pretty much do EVERYTHING Joomla does, but better. Love the simplicity of this plugin!” Sam, Web Contempo
”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
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, concert planner, or event consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time going through the user forum for useful ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WP plugins and WP themes that follow standard WP development guidelines. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its clients confirm:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
The software provides amazing support that includes access to a support forum, 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to run your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License Edition – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This license option enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This option lets you install Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, 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 at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. 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 setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about issues and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run any event that requires scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, or selling seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Plugin
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