Does your business currently run or plan to run events that require handling bookings or registrations, such as workshops, training courses, non-profit fundraisers, social events, or even a big event like a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event registrations is a time-consuming process. You will probably need to manage scheduling, availability, participant numbers, data collection and storage, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event registrants.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily copy settings for similar events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional online event registration system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily schedule multiple events and start receiving online bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being revamped 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 migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages 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 current web site into an automated and fully featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing 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 literally doing away with the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are enabling event attendees to perform the registration by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you focus more resources on planning a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a third party service. This is made possible by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add ons when you need extra functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event sign-ups 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process can be performed entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data collected from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users via standard features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Ready to use in no time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with the calendar.
- Tax Admin And Reporting. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of ways to administer taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants who purchase tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your theme and display registrant data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast by pre-configuring system-default ticket pricing.
- Promotional Codes. Offer promotion and discount codes to incentivize people to make a decision immediately, or make your offers more attractive for price-sensitive prospects. This is also practical if you want to sell-out events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is completely sold out. You can also make it a requirement wait-listed attendees pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by allowing potential attendees to interact with you online via commenting and previous attendees to post reviews that can help others consider whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for public commenting are set up in the WordPress built-in commenting admin area.
- Search Engine Friendly Event Page Web Links. Keyword rich URLs take advantage of your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly urls that have topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you drive more traffic to your site.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings that will be used when running your events, such as currency name, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, etc.
- Exportable Data. You can output all of your data gathered from your event participants into Excel or CSV format for producing advanced reports, planning marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Venue Manager. The venue management feature in EE 4 allows details about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your website 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 displays information such as venue capacity, venue site URL, phone number, venue address, Google map, etc. You can also display all of your venues throughout different locations on your WP theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a given venue.
- Automatic Plugin Installation Upgrading. Event Espresso provides easy one-click upgrades to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation up-to-date with new versions of WordPress.
- Staff Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in your event description.
- Accurate Attendee Management. You have control of your customers’ date; who has enrolled, which event they have registered for and how much they’ve 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 a list of event attendees to Excel for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your event registrants individually or all at once.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over your content and how your information displays to visitors.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for developers when potential problems.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: According to the mission statement on their site, 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 objectives, the company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including customer data in emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Addons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow customers to significantly expand the functionality of events.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display the scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- 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 ahead. You can create as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name shows all events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add on is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files add-on provides PHP files that allow you to override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Seating Chart Addon: The seating chart add-on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration addon 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 shopping cart. With the Multiple Event Registration add-on, 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 provides event managers with a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you modify the design 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 their own custom templates using one of the templates included as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration Add-on: The MailChimp add on allows you to auto-register attendees to a specified mailing list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
Users – Testimonials
Below are a few of the many testimonials that plugin 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
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”Loving the functions and support from Event Espresso. One of the best plugins I’ve ever bought!” Nathan
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, workshop promoter, or event professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, search the support forum for new ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management process or improve the experience of your participants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as so many of its end-users confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The software provides comprehensive support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, email 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 proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to run your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider using one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition lets you install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of event managers.
If you own a WordPress web site and you currently run any event that involves managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering participants, and booking seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
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