Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings or registrations, such as seminars, group classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, corporate functions, or even a big event like a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complex and time-consuming process. You will most likely have to manage event schedules, available dates and spaces, registration numbers, data administration, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give you more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered website, you can install an inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily schedule an event and start accepting online bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being revamped using a different structure to enable 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 retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to enrol by themselves.
Letting your attendees to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you concentrate more attention on creating a memorable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to developing your own software or using a third party service. This is made possible through a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add-ons when you need new features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new bookings 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event invite friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green & Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process is conducted entirely in digital form, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information gathered from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers via standard features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that users can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and simple to install and implement. Ready to use in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration. Event Espresso lets you gather specific information using custom event registration forms on your web site to create a great experience for your event participants.
- Customizable Event Designs. Match your website’s look and feel for your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and elements, plus HTML and CSS.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides several ways to administer taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fees to registrants when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to customize the display settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the chance of spammers and robots making bogus registrations on your web site with reCAPTCHA tools to provide human authentication.
- Discount Codes. Provide promotion and multiple discount codes to encourage prospects to register without delays, or simply make your offers more affordable for others. Also useful if you want to increase sales of events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you understand who your customers are and how you’ve done past business with them. Your Contact Profile section stores updated records such as the name, biography, contact details, event registration data, private comments, and more about each customer.
- No-Ticket Events. Set up events without requiring attendees to select tickets. Event Espresso can be used for any type of event, not only when tickets are required.
- Private Contact Notes. Record observations about a contact on their profile and how you have interacted with them. Private commenting enables you to keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have interacted with them.
- Optimized For The Most Recent Version Of WordPress. The EE 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you create beautiful event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Complete Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in full control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing, and also allows you to automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, custom event page designs, payment processing, list waiting, attendee limits, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your data collected from event participants into Excel or CSV format for creating reports, implementing new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets details about venues to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform registrants of your event’s location. The venue profile has many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays information like venue capacity, venue site URL, venue phone number, venue location details, maps, etc. You can also list venues on specific parts on your theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso gives you access to an expert community of experienced event managers and other plugin users. You can network with other Event Espresso users using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and site visitors can help create a wider exposure for your events using social media sharing buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can even customize your page templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for non-technical WordPress users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 makes possible more complex developments and customizations to the software.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data that can be helpful for developers who are diagnosing application errors.
- Flexibility, Autonomy 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 objectives, 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 includes 40+ added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes customer data in notification emails and updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to further enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Grid Template Add on: 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, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to browse for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: 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.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template addon is capable of displaying your event lists in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add-on is suitable 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 add on allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add-on lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives potential attendees 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 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.
- Events Calendar Add-on: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events via an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add-on permits other applications, web tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Here are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is one of the nicest Event Managers (WP Plugin) I have come across.” Joe Distefano, Citizen Joe
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”You guys have done an AWESOME job with this system…promise me to keep up the excellent work you guys are doing, for as long as you can… Respect!” Robert Jarnroth, Jarnroth Digital Productions
Useful Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, concert promoter, or event professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the support forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process or enhance the experience of your attendees.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive technical support, as many of its satisfied plugin users confirm:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
Event Espresso provides amazing support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, priority 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Product License Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you should consider using one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license option allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin sells for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a specific use-case, or to report problems and give feedback.
For all 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 manager software, used and trusted by thousands of companies.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run events that require managing dates, times and venues, registering participants, and/or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
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