Does your company currently run or plan to run events that require registrations, such as workshops, group courses, non-profit fund-raisers, marketing conferences, or even a big event like a regional festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complex process. You have to co-ordinate event schedules, event dates, registration numbers, data processing, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event participants.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can set up an inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily create your event and start processing bookings literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing software.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being revamped using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of using the plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Plugin 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
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to perform the registration process by themselves.
Allowing your enrollees to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you focus more attention on planning a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party provider. This is made possible by using a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add ons only if you need new features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new bookings 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with others who may also be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process is performed entirely online, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information obtained from your event participants.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users through standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that customers can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great features to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and set up. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration. Event Espresso lets you gather specific data using a custom event registration form on your site to plan a tailored experience for your event participants.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Customers can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Tax Admin & Reporting. Event Espresso 4 provides several ways to administer taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fees to registrants when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse registrant information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast by pre-configuring default ticket prices.
- Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system lets you authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you know who your clients are and how they have done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can join a waiting list if your event has reached maximum capacity. You can also specify that wait-list attendees pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Keep comments about event registrants on their profile and how you have assisted them. Private notes allows you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you’ve assisted them.
- Draft Events. Draft events allow you to develop an event page over multiple sessions without publishing it to your website. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to publish it live on your site, or schedule to publish your event page at a future time and date.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your WP themes. The organization information include: company name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, telephone number, tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for your events, you can automatically set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager in EE 4 allows information about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your site to inform users of your event’s location. The venue record has many standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue information such as venue seating capacity, venue website, venue phone number, physical and virtual location, Google map, etc. You can also list all of your event venues on specific locations in your theme and on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a given venue.
- Automatic Upgrades. Event Espresso offers easy 1-click software installation upgrading to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your software installation compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and your website visitors can help create a wider exposure for your event using social media share buttons.
- Attendee Reporting. Event reporting provides you with information of all of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money you’ve collected.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows web-based software developers to have more control and options over the content of your events and how your information displays to prospective event registrants.
- Metabox Management And Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow processes. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from the page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their web site, Event Espresso’s goal 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 modular 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 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the capabilities of your event management system.
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 the event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events management add on allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template shows event categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name displays the events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your website is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon 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 input personal information into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also look up previous events and make payment for new events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Versions: This add on lets you involve others in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, so your staff can help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WP dashboard and/or certain areas of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing add-on adds the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. People can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add on gives you an easy-to-use system that lets you 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 lets web developers design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on lets you automatically register participants to a specific mailing list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are a few of the testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”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
”Hello. I wanted to say that I’ve purchased Event Espresso twice now for two different organizations and have had great success with the purchases. Outside of photography, I also build small websites with WordPress as the CMS. I built two websites for two different martial arts organizations who host yearly seminars and tournaments. The plug in has provided a way for attendees to sign up online from both Canada and the United States with ease, and also allowed the organizations to easily manage payments, attendee lists, and many other aspects of the events. Thanks to Seth for creating such a great plug in, and for your constant support!” James Zedd, James Zedd Photography
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, conference promoter, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process and enhance the experience of your participants.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as many of its satisfied end-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 great support that includes access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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 a solution you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License Edition – This allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This license lets you install Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
Note: The pricing above was current when this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about errors and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run any event that requires scheduling dates and venues, enrolling attendees, and/or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Plugin For WordPress
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