Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as seminars, group classes, non-profit fundraisers, social events, or even a big event such as a regional festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will probably have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data administration, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event registrants.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate previous events, give you more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based site, you can download and install a very inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create multiple events and start receiving registrations in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling event attendees to perform the sign-up process on their own.
Allowing your clients to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you spend more of your attention on organizing a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy optional addons only if you need additional functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online signups outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social features and add-ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process can remain entirely in digital form, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information you acquire from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great built-in to website owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you create as many types of tickets as you need and specify prices, limits on ticket quantities, etc.
- Customized Confirmation Email Message. Configure automatic registration and payment notification emails to communicate with your attendees.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with several payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments before running events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary registrant’s information for any added registrants.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the default ticket price for the default ticket.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with 3 useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration Option. you have the option of registering event attendees at the door, or send in paper registration forms for manual submission later.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached maximum attendance. You can also make it a requirement wait-list members pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- XML RSS Feeds. Automatically update customers, bring in more visitors and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Most Up-To-Date WordPress Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you create aesthetically beautiful event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to be used throughout the software and your WP themes. Your organization data include: organization name, address, city, state, country, zip code, email address, phone number, tax number, your logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Data. You can export all of your data collected from event participants into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, devising marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Event Venue Management. The venue manager feature in EE 4 allows details about venues to be made available throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your website to inform registrants of the location of your event. The venue record displays many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add information such as venue capacity, venue web address, telephone number, physical and virtual location, directions map, etc. You can also display all of your event venues in specific locations on your WordPress theme as well as on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you engage with a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, web designers, online marketers and business owners who also use the software. You can engage with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your site visitors can help publicize your event using social share buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different types of events like free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different kinds of exercise classes, etc. you can categorize these to help event attendees to find what they’re searching for. You can list all the events in a category on an event category page, make the events searchable by category, and colour-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, as well as suggesting other events in the categories that appeal to your visitors.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for non-technical WordPress users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), Event Espresso 4 facilitates more complex developments and customizations to the software.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data that can be useful for developers who are troubleshooting.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 goals, 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+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the work of re-entering event information when creating new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow customers to further expand the capabilities of your event management system.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events manager add-on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can add as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations 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 be customized to display an event thumbnail image instead of the 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 any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files addon provides PHP files that allow you to bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This addon lets you involve others in the event management process and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and allow them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WordPress 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 add on.
- Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add-on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon 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 venues. Registrants 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 Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template addon gives event managers a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you edit 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 design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- EE4 Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Below are some of the many testimonials that users have posted about Event Espresso:
“It is a very, very slick plugin. It’s one of those plugins where you install it, change a couple of settings, and boom you’re selling tickets.” Brad Williams, WebDevStudios
“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
“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 motivational speaker, trainer, conference planner, or event professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the support forum for new ideas and practical ways to improve your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your participants.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its users confirm:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
Event Espresso provides exceptional support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, custom development 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This edition allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This lets you set up 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 Edition – This lets you configure Event Espresso on five sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons 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. Presently, the plugin sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about errors and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of WP site owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run any event that requires scheduling dates and venues, booking participants, and/or booking seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Software
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