Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings, such as seminars, community classes, charity fund raisers, corporate events, or even a large-scale event like a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data collection and admin, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily reproduce similar events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based web site, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule multiple events and start processing bookings in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ various event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually phase out Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.
More info:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and 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 practically doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling participants to enrol themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more energy on organizing a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party provider. This is made possible by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase addons only when you need additional features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online sign-ups outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may also be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process remains entirely online, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Information. You control all the data acquired from event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of built-in to site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you gather specific information using a custom event registration form on your site to create a great experience for your event participants.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Create the look and feel you want for your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s template options and components, plus HTML or CSS.
- Tax Admin And Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of ways to administer taxes for your event and report tax fee components to registrants who purchase tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse attendee information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the risk of spamming and bot software programs making bogus registrations on your web site with reCAPTCHA settings to provide human validation.
- 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 all participants.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event attendees and confirm those who have attended.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and can’t participate in your events.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by allowing potential prospects to ask questions about your event and past participants to post feedback that can help others choose whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for commenting are set in the WP native commenting section.
- Search Engine Friendly Event Page Web Links. Keyword rich event page URLs leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly web links that use topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you bring more traffic to your website.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing, and also lets you automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, customizable event page designs, payment processing and handling, list waiting, limits on attendees, printable ticketing and more.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating similar tickets for your events, you can automatically set up as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- WP Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WordPress Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily add graphic images and stylize your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any standard WordPress post or page.
- 1-Click Plugin Installation Updates. Event Espresso provides simple 1-click upgrading to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Staff Manager. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as staff member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in any event description.
- Accurate Attendee Manager. You have control of your attendees’ records; who has registered, which event they have registered for and how much they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional reports, send customized payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your clients individually or all at once.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for general users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 enables more complex extensions and customizations to the plugin.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to output a log file with debugging data which can be useful for web developers who are troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: 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 objectives, the company operates on 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 includes over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a series of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Addons
In addition to an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow software users to further enhance the capabilities of your event management system.
Some of these addons 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.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: 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 Template Add-on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your events in a number of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add on lets you involve other users in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and assign 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 users do not have access to certain sections of your WP 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.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing add on gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon 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.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add on gives you a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to change 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 allows web developers to design custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API addon allows other applications, web tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Testimonials
Here are some of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”I want to commend you on a fabulous product which is just the right price for a small non-profit. People are happy with the registration process, as are we! …Thank you SO much for a great product.” Sandra Forero Bush, World Trade Center Tacoma
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”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
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, workshop promoter, or event management professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the forums for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process or improve the experience of your event customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as many of its satisfied users attest:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
The software provides exceptional support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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 proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you should consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This option enables you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the software sells for the amounts 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 not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s online 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 a specific situation, or to report bugs and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run an event that involves managing dates, times and venues, registering attendees, and/or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management System
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