Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings, such as workshops, community classes, charity fund-raisers, social conferences, or even a big event like an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a time-consuming process. You will most likely need to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data collection and storage, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily reproduce repeat events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based web site, you can set up an inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily create your event and begin receiving bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as it has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are enabling event participants to enrol by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you spend more time on delivering a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a 3rd-party provider. This is made possible by using a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add ons only when you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new signups 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process can be transacted entirely online, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information obtained from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to end-users through standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great features to site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Ready to start accepting registrations in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you collect specific data using custom event registration forms on your web site to prepare a customized experience for your users.
- Custom Confirmation Email Message. Configure automatic booking and payment notification email messages to communicate with event attendees.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of options to manage taxes for an event and report tax fee components to registrants who purchase tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse contact details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast by pre-configuring default ticket pricing.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event attendees at the door, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual inputting later.
- No-Ticket Events. You can promote events without requiring participants to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for all forms of events, not only when tickets are needed.
- RSS Feeds. Keep your website visitors updated about your events, drive quality traffic and expand your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword-Rich Page URLs. Keyword rich event page Web links leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly permalinks that have relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you get more potential customers to your events.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to be used throughout the software and your front-end templates. Organization information include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, phone number, tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can set up as your default ticket for all new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Multiple Event Participant. EE 4 allows a single person or people to enroll multiple participants at once. Event managers decide how many attendees are able to enrol in a single session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Plugin Updates. Event Espresso offers easy one-click updating to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and website visitors can help publicize your events using social share buttons.
- Transaction Reports. Quick-view event reports gives you data of the registrations and transactions, enabling you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money you’ve collected.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are completely compatible with WordPress.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for normal site traffic whenever you need to make changes on your website. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 mission, the software has been built using a modular 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 over 40 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to significantly enhance the capabilities of events.
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 available, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays categories as a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows all events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your website 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.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to your special events. Members can also enter personal data into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also view event history and pay for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Versions: This add-on lets you involve others in the event management process 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 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 areas 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 Multiple Event registration add-on gives 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 shopping cart. With the Multiple 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.
- EE4 Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on gives you a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you edit 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 lets web developers design custom templates using one of the templates included as a base template.
- JSON API Add-on: The Event Espresso JSON API add on gives permission for 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 addons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Users – Testimonials
Here are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso rocks! I use it for my dance class registrations. Unlike most dance studios where people have to call or send an email in advance, Event Espresso puts a registration form right there in front of the user and allows me to collect valuable information from the user during the registration process with custom questions such as “Do you have previous dance experience?” or “How did you hear about us?”. It also gives my site a professional look and feel.” Ral, Ral’eau Salsa Dance Company
”I recently downloaded it to add to a nonprofit site for a Boy Scout troop and the features work wonderfully with what we wanted to accomplish for the site. It allows us to set up calendar, events, and even take payments for trips. At first, I thought that it would be overkill for such a small site, but now I see the possibilities and will definitely be offering Event Espresso to my clients that need an event organization system for their web sites.” Lucy Conn, Troop 462
”Hello. I wanted to say that I’ve purchased Event Espresso twice now for two different organizations and have had great success with the purchases. Outside of photography, I also build small websites with WordPress as the CMS. I built two websites for two different martial arts organizations who host yearly seminars and tournaments. The plug in has provided a way for attendees to sign up online from both Canada and the United States with ease, and also allowed the organizations to easily manage payments, attendee lists, and many other aspects of the events. Thanks to Seth for creating such a great plug in, and for your constant support!” James Zedd, James Zedd Photography
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, conference promoter, or event management consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the support forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management workflow or improve the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as so many of its satisfied clients attest:
”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 Event Espresso software provides robust support including access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, custom development 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 solution you can depend on to run your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you need to consider using one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license option lets you install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This license lets you run Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
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 author when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Information
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.
Use 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 if you have questions related to a specific use-case, or to report errors and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WP site owners.
If you own a WordPress web site and you currently run events that require managing dates, times and venues, booking participants, and/or booking seating, then you will probably not find a better WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
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