Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings, such as workshops, community classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, networking functions, or even a big event such as a music concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event registrations is a time-consuming process. You will probably need to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data entry, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event participants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily reproduce repeat events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based site, you can install an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily schedule multiple events and begin receiving online registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of using the plugin.
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Benefits
Here are just some 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 existing website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to enroll themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more energy on organizing a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service. The cost is kept low by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add ons only when you need added features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new bookings 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may be interested.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process is performed wholly in digital form, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data acquired from your event participants.
Plugin Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of features to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in no time.
- Customized Event Registration. Event Espresso lets you gather unique data using custom event registration forms on your web site to plan a customized experience for your attendees.
- Event Calendar. Participants can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using the calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with leading payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments prior to running the events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse contact details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let you create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing of the system-default ticket.
- Promotional Codes. Set up promotional and multiple discount codes to incentivize prospects to make a decision now, or simply make your offerings more attractive for others. Also useful if you want to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event registrants and check-in those who have attended.
- No Ticket Events. List events without making it necessary for attendees to get tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all forms of events, not only those that require tickets.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record comments about event attendees on their profile. Private commenting helps you keep a record of when event participants contacted you, your internal comments, and how you’ve interacted with your customers.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events let you develop an event page at your own leisure without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your events until you are ready to take it live, or schedule your event pages to publish at a future time and date.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing, and also allows you to automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, customizable event designs, payment processing, list waiting, limits on attendees, printable tickets and more.
- Import Event Data. EE 4 provides an advanced importing feature that enables you to easily import bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import data for events, datetimes, tickets, prices, custom registration questions, venues, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Participants. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or an organization to buy multiple tickets and different types of tickets at the same time. You specify how many people are able to register in one session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you interact with a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, designers, internet marketers and business owners who also use the software. You can engage with other Event Espresso users using their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your website visitors can tell others about your events using social media share buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have a number of types of events like free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different kinds of exercise classes, etc. you can categorize these to make it easier for your participants to find what they’re looking for. You can display all the events in a category on an event category page, make events searchable by category, and color-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, as well as suggesting other events in the categories that appeal to your visitors.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows you to have more control and options over your event pages and how your information displays to your readers.
- Metabox Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which gives you the ability to reconfigure the user interface to suit your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from the workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: 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 goals, the software has been built using a 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 over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as adding a service fee to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow plugin users to further enhance the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display all scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can schedule as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of your 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 be customized to show the event thumbnail image instead of a date.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: This add on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template addon can display your events in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add-on is great for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add on allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you control the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives potential customers 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 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 Calendar Addon: This addon uses the WordPress calendar to display events and event categories using an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp addon allows you to automatically register participants to a specified mailing list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
User Testimonials
Here are just some of the testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
“It is a very, very slick plugin. It’s one of those plugins where you install it, change a couple of settings, and boom you’re selling tickets.” Brad Williams, WebDevStudios
”Customizing an Event Registration plugin for WordPress by @EventEspresso. Love the pro version. Highly Recommended!” Joshua Garity
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, event promoter, or event management professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the support forum for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process or improve the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as many of its end-users confirm:
”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
Event Espresso provides amazing support including access to support forums, 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to run your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you should consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This lets you configure 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 Licensing – This enables you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This edition lets you run Event Espresso on five domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a specific situation, or to report problems and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of WP website owners.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run any event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and/or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration Software
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