Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating registrations, such as workshops, group courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, social functions, or even a big event such as a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a time-consuming process. You have to manage event schedules, available dates and seating allocations, attendee numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily reproduce previously-run events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based web site, you can easily install a very inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin allows you to easily schedule an event and begin processing online registrations in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as it has been revamped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin software 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 read more about this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling event participants to perform the registration themselves.
Letting your customers to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your resources on creating a better event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add ons when you need added functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event bookings any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process is completed entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- Own Your Information. You own all the information you obtain from your event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to web site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Registrants can easily see your events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, enabling you to collect registration fees prior to running events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and display events details throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the likelihood of spamming and robots making bogus registrations by using reCAPTCHA settings to provide human validation.
- Promotional Codes. You can leverage promotion and discount codes to incentivize people to register without delays, or simply make your offerings more affordable for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical if you want to sell-out events close to deadlines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how they have done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached capacity. Additionally, you can make it a requirement wait-list registrants pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- RSS Feeds. Provide automatic updates to your users, bring in more visitors and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page URLs. Keyword rich Web links leverage your WP Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly urls that use relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and improves your search rankings, helping you drive more visitors to your site.
- Country-specific Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used throughout Event Espresso, including currency, currency signs, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your data collected from event attendees into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, implementing marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- WordPress Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WP Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily add photos and write and edit your content without having to learn HTML or CSS, just like any typical WP post.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso provides users with access to a community of experienced event managers, developers, designers, marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can network with other Event Espresso users through their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Manager. Save time and keep your business organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in your event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different event types such as free and paid, workshops and mastermind sessions, different types of exercise classes, etc. you can categorize these to help your registrants to locate what they’re looking for. You can display 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 these easier to find, as well as suggesting new events in the categories that interest your visitors.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for most WP 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 permits more complex developments and customizations to the plugin.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data which can be useful for developers who are diagnosing problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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 mission, the software has been built using 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 includes 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the need to re-enter event data when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service tax to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Addons
As well as a very large array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to further enhance the capabilities of the event management system.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Addon: The Recurring Events management add on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can create as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to search for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your website uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon allows you to take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered website users can have access to these special events. Members can also input personal data into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also view previous events and pay for events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add on lets you offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues right from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to every seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing add on gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at the venue door. Registrants 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add on provides event managers with a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you modify the look and feel 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 build their own custom templates using one of the templates included as a source template.
- JSON API Add-on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add on enables other software applications, online tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website here:
Plugin Users – Testimonials
Below are a few of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”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, conference planner, or event management professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time visiting the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process or improve the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WordPress plugins and WP themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great user support, as many of its customers 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 robust support including access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority support and even a monthly VIP member pass that gives 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 solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you will want to consider using one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License Edition – This license allows you to install Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This edition lets you configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $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 plugin sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Additional Info
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 plugin’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific 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 web site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run an event that involves managing dates and venues, registering participants, and booking tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
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