Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings or registrations, such as seminars, group courses, not-for-profit fund-raisers, marketing functions, or even a big event such as a food fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a time-consuming process. You will probably have to co-ordinate scheduling, date availability, participant numbers, data entry, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to participants.
There are a number of 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 duplicate previous events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website, you can install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and start accepting bookings in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize event registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being rebuilt using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to enrol themselves.
Letting your participants to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you spend more of your energy on organizing a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a third party service provider. This is made possible by using a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase optional add-ons when you need additional features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event sign-ups 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite friends who may also be interested.
- Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can remain entirely online, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Information. You own all the information you collect from event participants.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users via standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great features to website owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and configure. Ready to start accepting registrations in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can collect unique information using a custom event registration form on your site to plan a unique experience for your event participants.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Set up automated registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with event registrants.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with several payment gateways, allowing you to collect money before running events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s information for any additional registrants.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the risk of spamming and bots making fake registrations with reCAPTCHA features to validate human activity.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with 3 detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you have done business with them. The Contact Profile page stores updated records such as the name, biography, contact details, event registration details, private comments, and more about each customer.
- No Ticket Events. You can list events without making it necessary for registrants to get tickets. Use Event Espresso for any kind of event, not only when tickets are for sale.
- RSS Event Feeds. Keep your customers up-to-date about your events, bring in more visitors and widen your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events enable you to develop your event over multiple sessions without publishing it to your site. You can keep working on your events until you are ready to take things live, or schedule to publish your event page at a later time and date.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso is is available in more than 15 languages, with more languages planned.
- Bulk Edit Events. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that enables you to quickly import bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and import details about events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, custom registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- WordPress WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WordPress WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily insert graphic images and write your event descriptions without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any WP post or page.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you interact with an expert community of experienced event managers and other plugin users. You can engage with other members of the Event Espresso community via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event customers who have not fully paid for their admission with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will reference pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the amount owing, and include links to the event, a payment url and a link where they can download the invoice.
- Transaction Reporting. Event reports gives you information of the registrations and transactions, allowing you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue you’ve collected.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for general users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 enables more complex extensions and customizations to the software.
- Control Box Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WP user interface, which brings the ability to organize the user interface to suit your workflow processes. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely deleted from the page.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: 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 mission, the company operates on a model 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+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the need to re-enter event information when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service fee to tickets).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow software users to further enhance the functionality of your 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 an event does not have a featured image, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with many datetimes into a dropdown list.
- 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 be customized to display the event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event prices when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered website users can have access to your special events. Members can also enter 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. Your users can also look up event history and pay for new events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add on lets you include other users 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 give them different permissions with different capabilities, so your staff can 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 sections 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 Multiple Event registration addon gives potential customers the ability to book 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 cart. With the Multiple 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 Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add-on: The MailChimp add-on lets you automatically register attendees to a specified mailing 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 complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are some of the many great testimonials that 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 recently downloaded it to add to a nonprofit site for a Boy Scout troop and the features work wonderfully with what we wanted to accomplish for the site. It allows us to set up calendar, events, and even take payments for trips. At first, I thought that it would be overkill for such a small site, but now I see the possibilities and will definitely be offering Event Espresso to my clients that need an event organization system for their web sites.” Lucy Conn, Troop 462
”I played around with the free version for a couple hours then purchased the Pro for a client. Love it and so do they! Sweetest Event plugin I have tried.” Bill Chambers, Bill Chambers Design
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, trainer, festival promoter, or event consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, spend a little time visiting the forums for useful ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its satisfied plugin users confirm:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
Event Espresso provides incredible support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you will want to consider using one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This option enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license enables you to 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 License – This license option enables you to set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the plugin is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author 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 register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about issues and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run events that require managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and/or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
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