Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require registrations, such as seminars, community courses, charity fundraisers, networking conferences, or even a big event like a festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event bookings can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You will most likely need to manage scheduling, event dates, attendee numbers, data entry, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to event participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for previously-run events, give you more control, create a better client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can easily install a very inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin enables you to easily set up an event and begin receiving online bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing software.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been revamped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform 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 learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website or blog into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels 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 improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for participants to register by themselves.
Allowing your participants to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you focus more resources on organizing a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon see, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add ons when you need additional functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event signups 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social features and addons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can be completed wholly online, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the data obtained from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to web site owners. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to configure as many different types of tickets as you need and set prices, number of tickets, and more.
- Customizable Event Designs. Customize your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and components, and HTML and CSS.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to handle taxes for your event and report tax fees to registrants when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally and on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s details for any added participants.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast by pre-configuring system-default ticket pricing.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track your participants.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your clients are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Control who can and can’t register for your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social interactivity to your events by allowing potential customers to interact with you online via commenting and past customers to post feedback that can help others choose whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for comments are configured via the WP native commenting system.
- SEO Friendly URLs. Keyword-rich event page Web links leverage your WP Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” permalinks with relevant keywords add to the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you drive more visitors to your events.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to be deployed throughout the software and your WordPress themes. The organization fields include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email address, phone number, tax number, business logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your data gathered from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, planning new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WordPress WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily add images and write your event descriptions without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any other WordPress post.
- Registrant Records. You can manage your customer’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their records organized and easily accessible.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and website visitors can help create a wider exposure for your event using social media share buttons.
- Accurate Event Attendee Manager. You control your attendees’ records; who has registered, for what event and what amount 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 Excel for additional uses, send customized payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your registrants individually or collectively.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for normal site traffic when website maintenance is required. You can still work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: 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 mission, the software has been built using a modular and highly efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the work of re-entering event data when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to each ticket).
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, 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 upcoming events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize the events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to browse for events that take place within a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: 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.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon allows you to take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site will have access to your special events. Members can also input personal details into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Users can also look up previous events and pay for events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart addon is great for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the experience for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to each seat.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your 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 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.
- EE4 Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on provides you with an easy-to-use system that allows you to change 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 custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- JSON API Addon: The new Event Espresso JSON API add on permits other applications, web tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso information through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Thanks to you and the rest of the team for Event Espresso – Every time I get a signup for an event, I think about how much time EE saves me – and signups happen while I’m out on the water teaching kayaking, not answering the phone. :-)” Tue Brems Olesen, OnAdventure
”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, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, concert planner, or event management consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, visit the forums for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration process and improve the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as so many of its end-users 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 great support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth 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 developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can count on to manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license option 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 allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This edition allows you to install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons 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 retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Note: The pricing above was current 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 Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands of WordPress website owners.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you intend to run an event that requires scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling participants, or reserving tickets, 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 & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
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