Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating registrations, such as seminars, community classes, non-profit fund-raisers, networking functions, or even a large-scale event like a music concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a complex process. You will most likely need to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, attendee numbers, data collection and admin, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for similar events, give event managers more control, create a better user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily create multiple events and begin processing registrations in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually transition completely to EE 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 some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even 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 doing away with the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling attendees to enroll on their own.
Letting your clients to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you spend more energy on creating a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party provider. The cost is kept low through a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add-ons only when you need added features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event sign-ups 24 hours a day. In addition, 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 in attending.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process is conducted wholly online, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information gathered from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users through standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Ready to start using in no time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Customizable Event Designs. Match your site’s look and feel for your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s template options and elements, as well as HTML and/or CSS.
- Tax Admin & Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 provides several ways to handle taxes for an event and report tax fees to customers who purchase tickets. You can administer taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and display contact data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the base ticket price of the default ticket.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with three useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of registrants and check in everyone who attends.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached maximum capacity. Additionally, you can specify that wait-list registrants pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for your event.
- XML RSS Feeds. Keep your users updated about your events, drive quality traffic and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- SEO Friendly Page URLs. Keyword rich event page URLs take advantage of your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” permalinks that have relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you get a more targeted audience to your events.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your WordPress themes. Organization data include: company name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email address, telephone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for most of your events, you can automatically set one of those tickets as your default ticket for all new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Event Venue Management. The venue manager in EE 4 lets information about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue profile displays many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add details such as venue capacity, venue web address, venue phone number, venue address, map, etc. You can also list venues in various sections on your theme as well as on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a given venue.
- Automatic Updating. Event Espresso provides simple one-click plugin updating to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your plugin installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and site visitors can help promote your event using social media sharing buttons.
- Accurate Event Attendee Management. You control your customers’ date; who has registered, which event they have booked and how much they paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to a CSV file for additional reports, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your clients individually or collectively.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over your event page content and how your information displays to your prospective event participants.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers when potential application errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility 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 goals, the company operates on 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 provides you with 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the work of re-entering event data when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to all tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an incredible number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to further enhance the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these add ons include:
- 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 an event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template displays the categories in a simple list. Clicking on a category name displays the events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Events Social Sharing Addon: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site can have access to your special events. Members can also input personal data into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Users can also view previous events and make payment for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Versions: This add on lets you include other users 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 WP users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, so others can help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas 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 add on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Addon: The Ticketing addon adds the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at the 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events via a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp add-on lets you automatically register participants to a particular autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are just some of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”This really is a hell of a plugin. For me, it’s probably the final nail in the coffin for Joomla, as WP can now pretty much do EVERYTHING Joomla does, but better. Love the simplicity of this plugin!” Sam, Web Contempo
”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 an education services provider, presenter, workshop promoter, or event management consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your event participants.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its satisfied plugin end-users attest:
”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 robust support including access to a support forum, 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This license option allows you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to install Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin is being retailed for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional 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.
Use the plugin’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to report problems and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of event promoters.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run any event that requires managing dates and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
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