Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings or registrations, such as seminars, training courses, non-profit fund raisers, corporate conferences, or even a large-scale event such as a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations is a time-consuming process. You will most likely need to co-ordinate event schedules, available dates and seating, participant numbers, data administration, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event attendees.
There are many benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered web site, you can download and install an inexpensive and highly professional online event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily schedule your event and begin accepting online registrations in just a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ various event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as the plugin is being rebuilt using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into an automated and feature-rich event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing 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 eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating attendees to enroll on their own.
Allowing your clients to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you spend more of your attention on delivering a more enjoyable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own solution or using a 3rd party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add ons only when you need new features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online registrations 24 hours a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with friends who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process is performed entirely online, eliminating typical paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information you collect from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers via built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that users can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to web site owners. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to configure as many different types of tickets as you need and set separate pricing options, ticket quantity limits, etc.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Customers can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with several payment gateways, enabling you to collect booking payments prior to running the events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to configure the display settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the risk of spammers and bots creating false registrations on your web site by using reCAPTCHA settings to provide human validation.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 comes with 3 comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you’ve previously engaged with them. Your Contact Profile page stores the name, biography, contact information, event registration details, private comments, etc. about each registrant.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event is full. Additionally, you can make it a requirement wait-list members pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Public Commenting. Add social interactivity to your event page by allowing potential prospects to ask questions about your event and past attendees to post comments that can help others consider whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for comments are configured via the WordPress commenting admin area.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page Web Links. Keyword rich event page Web links take advantage of your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” web links that include relevant keywords add to the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you get more potential customers to your events.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in full control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and also allows you to automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event page designs, payment processing and handling, list waiting, attendee limits, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your information gathered from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for creating reports, planning marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, etc..
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the standard WP Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert photos and format your content without having to learn HTML or CSS, just like any standard WordPress post.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you engage with an expert community of experienced event managers and plugin users. 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 clients who have not made payment for their enrollment with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will reference pre-registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the amount they owe, and include a link to the event, a payment url and a url where they can download a PDF invoice.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize your page templates to display events in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow you to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. Event Espresso 4 lets you create a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for developers when diagnosing software problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the mission statement on their site, Event Espresso’s objective is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their goals, the company operates on a modular and highly effective 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 customer data in emails and newsletters.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to each ticket).
- Default payment status.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow plugin users to further enhance the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display upcoming events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template shows categories in a simple list. Clicking the category name shows all events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template addon can display your events in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Editions: This add-on lets you include 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 WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, allowing staff to help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain parts of your WordPress 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.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your potential attendees the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing registrants will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their shopping cart. With the Multi-Event Registration addon, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- Events Calendar Add-on: This add on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events via an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp addon allows you to automatically register attendees to a specified mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Testimonials
Here are just some of the many testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is so easy to use yet feature rich and stable. It is a cornerstone of our site and our success.” Fraser Barner, Speaker’s Lab
”You can tell that the Event Espresso team is really passionate about their work, and that they care and spend a lot of time helping people work with their plugin and use it with their events – it’s something every WordPress service should aim for.” Ryan Imel, WPCandy
”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 an education services provider, presenter, concert promoter, or event management consultant, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, visit the forums for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your customers.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its end-users confirm:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
Event Espresso provides robust support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin functionality, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This option allows you to 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.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin is being retailed for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time 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
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online 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 specific situation, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of WP site owners.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run events that involve scheduling dates, times and venues, booking participants, and/or booking seating, then you will probably not find a better WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
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