Do you currently run or plan to run events that require managing registrations, such as workshops, group classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, social events, or even a large-scale event like a community fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, attendee numbers, data processing and storage, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event participants.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily reproduce previously-run events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based website or blog, you can install a very inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software lets you easily create an event and start processing online bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the software has been revamped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of using this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for participants to complete the registration process by themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you invest more of your resources on organizing a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional plugin benefits 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. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy optional add ons only when you need additional features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event registrations any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with other people they know who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event booking process can remain wholly online, reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information collected from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to users through built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great features to WP users. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), and these can be managed from one single event.
- Custom Confirmation Email Message. Set up automated registration and payment notification emails to communicate with event customers.
- Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects so they can choose the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to configure the settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Default Prices. Set up events quickly by pre-configuring default ticket pricing.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. Provide promotional and multiple discount codes to incentivize visitors to make a decision without delaying, or simply make your offers more affordable for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical if you want to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event participants at the door, or send in paper-based registration forms for manual submission later.
- Ticketless Events. Create events without requiring participants to select tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all types of events, not only when tickets are needed.
- Private Comments On Contacts. Record notes about contacts on their profile. Private notes helps you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve helped your contacts.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to develop your event at your own pace without displaying it live on your site. You can keep building your events until you are ready to publish it live to your website, or schedule to publish your event page at a later date and time.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of all aspects of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and also allows you to automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event page designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, limits on attendees, printable ticketing and more.
- Exportable Data. You can export all the information collected from event participants into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, devising new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Multiple Event Attendee. EE 4 allows an individual or an organization to order multiple tickets and different ticket types simultaneously. Event managers specify how many people are allowed to enrol in a single registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, designers, marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and site visitors can help spread the word about your events using social media share buttons.
- Accurate Event Attendee Management. You have control of your attendees’ records; who has enrolled, which event they have booked and how much they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your customers on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over your content and how the information displays to prospects.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reconfigure the user interface to suit your workflow process. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely deleted from your page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: According to the mission statement 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 goals, the software has been built using 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 comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service fee to all tickets).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an incredible range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow users to significantly enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display all upcoming events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can create as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can also be customized to display the event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- 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 booking.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files add-on provides PHP files that let you override certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & 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 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 staff to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does 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 addon.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives potential customers the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their shopping 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.
- Events Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template addon gives you an easy-to-use system that lets you modify 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 lets developers build custom templates using one of the templates provided as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Add-on: The MailChimp addon lets you automatically register attendees to a specified autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Customer Feedback
Here are just some of the many testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District
“I just completed my first event using Event Espresso. I really believe without Event Espresso my event would not have been the success it was.” Cathy Earle, Women Only Weekend
”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 motivational speaker, presenter, workshop promoter, or event management professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered owner, search the forums for new ideas and practical ways to improve your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as so many of its plugin customers confirm:
”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
Event Espresso provides amazing support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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.
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 rely on to organize and manage your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you install Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you run Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Software For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a specific use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of WordPress users.
If you own a WordPress web site and you plan to run an event that requires managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and/or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Software
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