Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings, such as seminars, training classes, not-for-profit fund-raisers, corporate events, or even a big event like a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event sign-ups is a complex process. You will probably have to manage event schedules, available dates and seating, participant numbers, data entry, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily replicate repeat events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up your event and start processing registrations in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
Learn more here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the 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 into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for event attendees to perform the registration by themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more resources on planning a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a 3rd-party provider. The cost is kept low through a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase optional addons when you need added functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online event signups outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite others who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process remains entirely online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information gathered from your event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its users via standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Ready to use in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Customizable Event Designs. Match your site’s design for your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s template options and components, plus HTML or CSS.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with several payment gateways, allowing you to collect money before running your events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and reuse venue data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the default ticket pricing for your default ticket.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 includes 3 built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. EE 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your customers are and how you’ve previously engaged with them. Your Contact Profile page records the name, biography, contact details, event registration history, private comments, etc. about each registrant.
- Ticketless Events. Create events without the requirement for participants to select tickets. Use Event Espresso for all types of events, not only when tickets are required.
- Public Commenting. Add social interactivity to your event page by encouraging potential customers to ask questions about your event and past attendees to post feedback that can help others decide whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for comments are specified in the WP commenting system.
- Keyword Rich URLs. Keyword rich event page URLs take advantage of your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly web links that use topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you get a more targeted audience to your website.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to display throughout the software and your WP themes. The organization information include: organization name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email, phone, tax number, your logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Import Events. EE 4 provides an advanced importing feature that enables you to import bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Management. The venue manager in EE 4 lets details about venues to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform attendees of the location of your event. The venue profile has many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes information such as venue seating capacity, venue web address, telephone number, venue location details, Google map, etc. You can also display venue profiles throughout specific sections in your WordPress theme as well as on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a particular venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you network with a community of experienced event managers, web developers, designers, marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can network with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event customers who have not fully paid for their enrollment with a standard but personalized invoice with one click. Your invoices will reference pre-registered participants who have not paid their registration in full by name, display the amount they owe, and include links to the event details, a payment link and a link to download the invoice.
- Accurate Attendee Management. You control your customers’ date; who has registered, which event they have registered for 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 event attendees to a spreadsheet for additional uses, send custom payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your clients 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 your prospects.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for regular website visitors whenever you need to make updates on your site. You can still work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their web 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 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 version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including attendee data in confirmation emails and updates.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these addons include:
- 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 Management Add on: The Recurring Events manager addon enables you to put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can add as many events in advance as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that take place in a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your event lists in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon is suitable 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 add on allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the environment for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single pricing to every seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at the door. Attendees 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.
- EE4 Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on gives you an easy-to-use system that allows you to 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 allows web developers to build their own custom templates using one of the templates provided as a base template.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API add on lets other applications, online tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso details through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new addons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website here:
Testimonials
Here are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers 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
”This really is a hell of a plugin. For me, it’s probably the final nail in the coffin for Joomla, as WP can now pretty much do EVERYTHING Joomla does, but better. Love the simplicity of this plugin!” Sam, Web Contempo
”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
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, event planner, or event professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve 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 ways to streamline your event management workflow and improve the experience of your customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP development guidelines. If you find that you need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its satisfied plugin end-users confirm:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
Event Espresso provides great support with access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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 web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to run your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This allows you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This allows you to configure 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 enables you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular situation, or to report bugs and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of companies.
If you own a WordPress site and you plan to run any event that requires managing dates and venues, enrolling attendees, or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration Software
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