Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings, such as seminars, group courses, non-profit fund raisers, social events, or even a big event such as a community festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complex process. You may have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, available dates and seating, registration numbers, data collection and storage, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for similar events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can install a very inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily schedule multiple events and start receiving bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a range of 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 social media and email marketing solutions.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually move completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits 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 existing digital presence into an automated and fully featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event attendees to perform the registration themselves.
Letting your participants to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more resources on creating a better event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service. The cost is kept low by using a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add ons when you need additional functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online sign-ups outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can remain wholly online, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information you obtain from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from one single event.
- Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. You can customize your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and parts, and HTML and/or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present several ticket options to prospects so they can choose the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary attendee’s registration details for any added participants.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast by pre-configuring default pricing.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you validate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up various check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event participants at the door, or send in paper-based registration forms for manual inputting later.
- No-Ticket Events. Promote events without requiring participants to get tickets. Use Event Espresso for all kinds of events, not only when tickets are for sale.
- Private Contact Notes. Record notes about a contact on their profile and how you have helped them. Private notes allows you to keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have interacted with your contacts.
- Optimized For The Most Up-To-Date Version Of WP. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create visually attractive event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, including currency name, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, etc.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for any new events simply by checking a box.
- Venue Manager. The venue management feature in EE 4 lets information about venues to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform visitors of your event’s location. The venue profile displays many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes information such as venue seating capacity, venue web address, telephone number, venue address, Google map, etc. You can also display all of your venues on specific locations on your WP theme as well as on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- Automatic Upgrading. Event Espresso offers easy 1-click upgrades to ensure that you have the newest features and to keep your plugin installation working with new versions of WordPress.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential clients who have not fully paid for their booking with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will address registered attendees who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the balance they owe, and include links to the event, a payment link and a link where they can download the invoice.
- Categorize Events. If you have a number of types of events such as free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different types of courses, etc. you can categorize them to help your attendees to locate what they’re looking for. You can list all events in a category on a custom event category page, make events searchable by category, and colour-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make these easier to find, as well as suggesting other events in the categories that appeal to your visitors.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for non-technical WordPress users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), Event Espresso 4 enables more complex developments and customizations to the plugin.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers when troubleshooting.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, 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 mission, the software has been built using a modular and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including customer data in notification emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add ons
As well as a comprehensive array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow software users to further enhance the capabilities of the event management system.
Some of these add-ons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Addon: 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 Add on: The Recurring Events management addon allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can add as many events in advance as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all 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 in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event pricing 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 enter personal information into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Users can also look up past events and pay for new events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This add-on lets you involve staff in the event management process and give new users permission 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 capabilities, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro addon.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives potential customers the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing registrants will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their cart. With the Multi-Event Registration addon, 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 Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template addon gives event managers 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 build their own custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API addon gives permission for other software applications, online tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Below are a few of the many testimonials that users have written about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is so easy to use yet feature rich and stable. It is a cornerstone of our site and our success.” Fraser Barner, Speaker’s Lab
”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
”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, show planner, or event professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the forums for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow or improve the experience of your attendees.
Product Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as many of its satisfied plugin 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
Event Espresso provides amazing support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to run your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This option enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one 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. Currently, the software retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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 software’s online 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 specific situation, or to notify developers about problems and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, and/or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
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