Do you currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings, such as workshops, group classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, social events, or even a large-scale event such as an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations can be a complex process. You may be required to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and seating allocations, registration numbers, data collection, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to participants.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give you more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered website, you can install an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily schedule multiple events and begin processing registrations literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing systems.
View detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for 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 phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased 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.
Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to register on their own.
Letting your attendees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you spend more of your energy on creating a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a third party service. The cost is kept low through a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy optional add ons only if you need additional features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new registrations 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing add-ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite their friends who may be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process remains entirely in digital form, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information you acquire from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its customers through built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that customers can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to WP users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure multiple ticket types and specify different pricing options, ticket quantity limits, and more.
- Event Calendar. Customers can easily see your events and add these to their schedule using a WordPress calendar.
- Tax Admin And Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to handle taxes for an event and report tax fees to customers when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to configure the look and control settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly and easily with pre-configured system-default ticket prices.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event attendees when they show up, or send in paper-based registration forms for manual inputting later.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has become completely sold out. You can also specify that waiting list members pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- RSS Event Feeds. Provide automatic updates to your website visitors, drive quality traffic and expand your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you develop your event at your own leisure without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your event until you are ready to publish it on your website, or schedule to publish your event pages at a later time and date.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso can be run in over 15 languages, with more languages coming soon.
- Bulk Upload Events. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that lets you quickly import bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, tickets, prices, custom registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Attendee Enrolments. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or a group to pay for multiple tickets and different ticket types at once. Event managers decide how many attendees are able to enroll in a single registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you engage with an expert community of experienced event managers and other plugin users. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential attendees who have not paid in full for their booking with a standard but personalized PDF invoice with just one click. Your invoices will reference registered participants who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the amount they owe, and include links to the event information, a payment link and a link where they can download the invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can even customize your page templates to display events in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso software that are compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for developers when troubleshooting.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their web site, Event Espresso’s goal 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 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 provides you with 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to each ticket).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a very large array of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to significantly expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display scheduled events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays event categories as a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows the events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your attendees to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- 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 users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website will have access to these special events. Members can also input personal information into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Users can also view past events and pay for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add-on lets you involve staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers the ability 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 events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing add-on gives you the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. People 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Add on: This addon uses the WP calendar to display events and categories of events via an attractive graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track registrations, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Here are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:
”It’s been very comprehensive and covers exactly the aspects of event registration that we needed for our site plus some features that we didn’t even need but could still use in the future. Very Excellent Plugin!” Tristan Hall, Area 12:2 Youth Group
”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, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
”I’m so excited to fire Eventbrite! Event Espresso has an amazing WP plugin for event management. We’re testing it now & are very impressed! In a nutshell Event Espresso saves us money & does everything Eventbrite did before. :)” Dustin Nay
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, workshop planner, or event management professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, go through the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process and enhance the experience of your event registrants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its satisfied plugin customers 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 plugin provides exceptional support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider using one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This edition lets you configure Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This lets you install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license option lets you run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $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 prices 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 seller when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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 plugin’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to report issues and leave 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 preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run any event that requires scheduling dates and venues, booking attendees, and/or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Software
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