Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings, such as seminars, group courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, marketing conferences, or even a large-scale event such as a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event sign-ups is a complex process. You need to co-ordinate event schedules, available dates and seating allocations, participant numbers, data collection and admin, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give event managers more control, create a better user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can easily set up an inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily schedule an event and start accepting bookings in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the software is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future expansion. 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 read more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated 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 emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating event participants to enroll by themselves.
Letting your customers to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you spend more of your energy on organizing a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin 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 to a minimum by using a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add-ons when you need new functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online sign-ups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features and addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process can be performed entirely online, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data you obtain from event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique features to site owners. Here are just a few:
- Quick and simple to install and implement. Ready to start accepting registrations in very little time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you create as many kinds of tickets as you need and set separate prices, ticket quantity limits, and more.
- Customizable Event Page Designs. Create a unique look and feel for your events and enrollments page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and components, as well as HTML and CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with several payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments before running the events.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration details for any additional attendees.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast with pre-configured default ticket prices.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track attendees.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of booking event attendees when they show up, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual processing later.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can and can’t participate in your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of interaction to your event page by allowing potential registrants to interact with you online via commenting and previous customers to post comments that can help others choose whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for public comments are set up in the WP native commenting settings.
- Draft Events. Draft events allow you to develop an event over multiple sessions without displaying it live on your site. You can keep working on your event pages until you are ready to take it live, or schedule your event to publish at a later time and date.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your profile to be used throughout the plugin and your front-end templates. The organization fields include: business name, address, city, state, country, zip code, email, phone number, VAT/tax number, your logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Information. You can output all of your data gathered from event customers into Excel or CSV format for producing advanced reports, planning marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WordPress Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert graphic images and write your content without having to learn HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post or page.
- Attendee Profiles. Manage each registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized and easily accessible.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and site visitors can spread the word about your event using social share buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have a number of types of events like free and paid, conference speakers and breakout sessions, different types of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize them to help your registrants to locate what they’re looking for. You can display all events in a category on a custom event category page, make events searchable by category, and colour-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, in addition to suggesting other events in the categories that appeal to your visitors.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 allows for more complex extensions 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 web developers who are diagnosing plugin problems.
- 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 mission, the company operates on a modular 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 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including attendee data in confirmation emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to significantly enhance the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: 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 Drop-down Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template shows event categories as a simple list. Clicking the category name displays the events related to that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your website uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices when 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 store personal information into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also view event history and pay for new events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This addon lets you include other users in the event management process and give new users the capacity 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 allow them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing others to 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 WP dashboard and/or certain sections 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.
- Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing add on adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on adds the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at the venue door. Customers 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.
- Events Calendar Add-on: This add-on uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories via a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add on lets you automatically register participants to a specific 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 more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are a few of the testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
“Love the plugin, we only use it once a year for a race we have in February. This saved us tons of time in data entry. In addition, we had more runners register than any other year. We attribute that to the ease of registering online. Thanks for your work.” Ed, Friends of Oscar Scherer Park
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, event promoter, or event management professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the user forum for new ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process and improve the experience of your event customers.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as many of its plugin customers attest:
”These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
The plugin provides incredible support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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 WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to manage your events.
Software Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you should consider using one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This allows you to run Event Espresso on one site only. 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 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This edition allows you to set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 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 is being retailed for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to report bugs and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of WordPress users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run any event that involves scheduling dates, times and venues, booking attendees, and reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Plugin
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