Do you currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings, such as seminars, training classes, not-for-profit fund-raisers, corporate functions, or even a big event like an art exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a complex process. You will most likely need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, available dates and seating, attendee numbers, data processing, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily replicate previous events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based web site, you can install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule your event and start receiving bookings in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand 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 offers two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of using the plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
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:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity 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 improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event attendees to register themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more resources on delivering a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a 3rd-party provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where users buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional add-ons only when you need extra functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online signups 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with other people they know who may also be interested.
- Green Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process can be performed entirely online, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information acquired from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to end-users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique features to web site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure multiple ticket types and specify prices, limits on ticket quantities, etc.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Easily set up automatic booking and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with event participants.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to administer taxes for an event and report tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. You can administer taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse contact details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily with pre-configured default prices.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. Offer promotion and discount codes to encourage prospects to make a buying decision immediately, or make your events more attractive for price-sensitive prospects. This is also practical for helping to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of attendees and check-in those who attend.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can participate in your events.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by encouraging potential registrants to interact with you online via commenting and past participants to post comments that can help others consider whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for commenting are configured via the WordPress native commenting admin area.
- Search Engine Friendly Event Page URLs. Keyword-rich event page URLs take advantage of your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” urls with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you drive more visitors to your events.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to be used throughout the plugin and your front-end templates. Organization data include: business name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email, telephone, tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Import Event Data. EE 4 provides an advanced importing capability that enables you to import bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, tickets, prices, registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Attendees. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or a group to pay for multiple tickets and different types of tickets simultaneously. Event managers specify how many attendees can register in one registration session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso provides users with access to an expert community of experienced event managers and other plugin users. You can interact with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential registrants who have not made payment for their enrollment with a standard but personalized invoice with one click of a button. Your invoices will reference pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the balance owing, and include a link to the event, a payment url and a link to download a PDF invoice.
- Attendee Reports. Event reporting gives you information of all registrations and transactions, enabling you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue you have collected.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over your events and how your information displays to your site visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular site visitors when website maintenance is needed. You can still work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their web site, Event Espresso’s objective 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 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 provides you with over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Add-Ons
In addition to a comprehensive array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow plugin users to significantly enhance the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add-on allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can schedule as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that take place within a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Addon: This addon adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add-on can display your events in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add-on is great for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal 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 right from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to every seat.
- Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing add-on adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the door. Attendees 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 Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events via an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add-on: The MailChimp addon allows you to auto-register participants to a specific mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Below are some of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”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
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, festival promoter, or event management consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, search the support forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your attendees.
Product Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent technical support, as many of its satisfied plugin end-users confirm:
“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 great support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider using one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition lets you configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This edition allows you to configure Event Espresso on five domains. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
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 author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular use-case, or to report issues and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress site and you intend to run events that involve scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering participants, and/or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software
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