Do you currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community classes, charity fund-raisers, corporate events, or even a large-scale event like a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a complex process. You will probably need to manage calendar schedules, event dates, participant numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to participants.
There are many benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily reproduce recurring events, give event managers more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based digital presence, you can install a very inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and start receiving bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the plugin has been redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
More info:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages 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 existing online presence into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher 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 chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to register by themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you direct more of your energy on creating a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a third-party provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where users purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add-ons when you need extra features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event signups outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with their friends who may be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process can remain entirely online, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data you acquire from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users through standard features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great features to site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Ready to use in very little time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Easily set up customized automated registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with your participants.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with several payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments before running events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and display venue data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events fast with pre-configured default ticket pricing.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. Set up promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage people to make a buying decision now, or simply make your offers more appealing for others. This is also practical if you want to sell out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your clients are and how you have done business with them. The Contact Profile page stores updated records like the name, biography, contact details, event registration details, private comments, and more about each registrant.
- Ticketless Events. Promote events without making it necessary for participants to select tickets. Use Event Espresso for any kind of event, not just those that accept tickets.
- Private Contact Comments. Record observations about contacts on their profile and how you’ve assisted them. Private notes lets you keep records of when event registrants contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have interacted with your customers.
- Optimized For The Latest Version Of WordPress. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create beautifully-designed event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used to run your events, such as currency, currency symbols, decimal characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Import Event Data. EE 4 provides an advanced importing capability that allows you to upload bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and import details about events, datetimes, tickets, prices, custom registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WordPress Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily insert images and write your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any typical WP post.
- Registrant Profiles. You can manage each customer’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized and easily accessible.
- Staff Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in an event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different types of events like free and paid, conference speakers and mastermind sessions, different kinds of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize them to help event attendees to locate what they’re searching for. You can display all the events in a category on a custom event category page, make all events searchable by category, and color-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, in addition to suggesting new events in the categories that appeal to your visitors.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are completely compatible with WordPress.
- Metabox Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which brings the ability to organize the user interface to suit your workflow processes. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from the page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & 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 effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with 40+ additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events within the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Addons
In addition to a comprehensive number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow users to further expand the functionality of managing an event.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 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 an event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
- 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 the event thumbnail image instead of a date.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: 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 Template Add on: The Custom Template add-on is capable of displaying your events in a range of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Editions: This addon lets you involve staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers permission to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing staff to help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts 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 addon.
- Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing add on gives you the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on gives you the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. Customers 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 registrants and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Addon: The Event Espresso JSON API add-on allows other applications, online tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso content through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
User Testimonials
Here are some of the many testimonials that satisfied plugin users 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
”Customizing an Event Registration plugin for WordPress by @EventEspresso. Love the pro version. Highly Recommended!” Joshua Garity
”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! 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 (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, show promoter, or event management professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, search the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management workflow or improve the experience of your attendees.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with other 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 technical support, as many of its customers attest:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
The software provides exceptional support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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 plugin you can count on to organize and manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you need to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal License Edition – This license option enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This license allows you to run Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This option lets you set up Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the plugin is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a specific use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and share feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of businesses.
If you own a WordPress site and you currently run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues, registering attendees, and booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
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