Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings or registrations, such as seminars, community courses, charity fund-raisers, networking events, or even a big event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event sign-ups is a complex process. You will most likely be required to manage calendar schedules, availability, attendee numbers, data processing and storage, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate previous events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-powered web site, you can easily install a very inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin lets you easily schedule an event and start processing online bookings in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it is being rebuilt using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
More info:
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:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into an automated and feature-rich event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling event participants to perform the registration by themselves.
Allowing your participants to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more resources on planning a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you 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 Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add ons when you need new features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online event registrations any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features and addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite others who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process can remain entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data obtained from your event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users via built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to website owners. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with leading payment gateways, enabling you to collect registration payments before running the events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse registrant information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the risk of spammers and robots making false registrations with reCAPTCHA tools to provide human authentication.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track event participants.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of registrants and confirm everyone who attends.
- No Ticket Events. List events without the requirement for registrants to get tickets. Use Event Espresso for all types of events, not only those that need tickets.
- XML RSS Feeds. Keep your website visitors up-to-date about your events, drive quality traffic and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword Rich URLs. Keyword rich URLs leverage your WordPress site’s Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly permalinks with topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your events.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing, and also lets you automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event page designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, attendee limits, printable tickets and more.
- Exportable Data. You can export all of your data gathered from event participants into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, devising marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Register Multiple Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or an organization to book multiple participants at once. Event managers can control how many people are allowed to register in a single session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- One-Click Plugin Updates. Event Espresso provides simple one-click updating to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your plugin installation compatible with new versions of WordPress.
- Team Member Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have multiple event types such as free and paid, workshops and mastermind sessions, different types of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize them to help event attendees to locate what they’re looking for. You can display all events in a category on an event category page, make all events searchable by category, and colour-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, as well as suggesting other events in the categories that interest your existing customers.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how your information displays to your prospects.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data that can be useful for web developers who are potential application errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 software has been built using a modular and effective model 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:
- Live-filtering when searching for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service fee to all tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to further expand the functionality of your 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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events manager add on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can create as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you like. 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 an event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add-on can display your event lists in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Versions: This add-on lets you involve other staff 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 WordPress users roles and allow them different permissions with different privileges, so others can 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 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 And Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Customers 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.
- Events Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template addon gives event managers a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to 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 developers build custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration Add-on: The MailChimp add on lets you auto-register attendees to a particular mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Here are some of the many testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
”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 an education services provider, trainer, conference planner, or event management professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Product Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WordPress coding guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as many of its satisfied clients attest:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
The plugin provides incredible support including access to support forums, in-depth 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 count on to manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This license option allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This option allows you to run Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software is being retailed for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about problems and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run events that require scheduling dates and venues, booking attendees, and/or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a better WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
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