Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating bookings, such as workshops, community courses, charity fund raisers, marketing functions, or even a large-scale event such as a concert, 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 and time-consuming process. You may be required to manage scheduling, dates, participant numbers, data collection and admin, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event registrants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for recurring events, give you more control, improve client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be very expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can download and install an inexpensive and professional web-based event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule an event and start processing online registrations in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: EE 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 enable future growth. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Essentially, you are enabling participants to register by themselves.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you direct more of your resources on organizing a more unique event.
More 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 users to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a 3rd party provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy addons only if you need added features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online signups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite their friends who may also be interested.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process can be kept entirely in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information you collect from your event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users through standard features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of features to site owners. Here are just a few:
- Fast and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from one single event.
- Custom Confirmation Email Message. Easily set up customized automatic registration and payment notification email messages to communicate with your customers.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospects and let them choose the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to configure the look and control settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details sections.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the likelihood of spamming and bots making false registrations on your web site with reCAPTCHA option to validate human activity.
- Discount Codes. Provide promotion and discount codes to incentivize prospects to make a decision now, or make your offerings more appealing for others. This is also practical if you want to sell out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you understand who your clients are and how you’ve previously done business with your clients. Your Contact Profile section records the name, biography, contact information, event registration history, private comments, and more about each customer.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective participants can join a waiting list if your event is full. You can also specify that wait-listed registrants pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- Public Commenting. Add social engagement to your event by encouraging potential customers to ask questions about your event and past participants to post comments that can help others consider whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for public comments are specified using the WordPress default commenting section.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events enable you to develop your event in your own time frame without displaying it live on your site. You can work on your event pages until you are ready to take it live, or schedule to publish your event at a later date and time.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency name, currency symbols, decimal signs, characters and places, country codes, states or provinces, and so on.
- Bulk Import Event Data. EE 4 provides an advanced importing capability that enables you to easily upload bulk event data at once. You can export, edit and upload information about events, datetimes, tickets, prices, custom registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Attendee Registration. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or a group to buy multiple tickets and different ticket types at the same time. You specify how many attendees can enroll in a single session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- 1-Click Software Updating. Event Espresso provides easy one-click software updating to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your plugin installation compatible with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and website visitors can help spread the word about your events using social share buttons.
- Transaction Reporting. Quick-view event reports gives you data of the registrations and transactions, enabling you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and how much money you have collected.
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 prospective customers.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular website visitors when you need to perform maintenance on your site. You can continue to work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, 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 mission, the company operates on a 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+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to all tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page in the registration process.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to significantly expand the functionality of managing an event.
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. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events management add-on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can create as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to search for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your web site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template addon can display your event lists in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Versions: This add-on lets you include your staff in the event management process 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 WP users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing others to help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add on.
- Multiple Event Registration Add on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives potential customers the ability to register for multiple events at once. In each event listing attendees will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their cart. With the Multiple 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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events in a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp add-on lets you auto-register attendees to a specific autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Plugin Users – Feedback
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have written about Event Espresso:
“It is a very, very slick plugin. It’s one of those plugins where you install it, change a couple of settings, and boom you’re selling tickets.” Brad Williams, WebDevStudios
”Customizing an Event Registration plugin for WordPress by @EventEspresso. Love the pro version. Highly Recommended!” Joshua Garity
”I’m so excited to fire Eventbrite! Event Espresso has an amazing WP plugin for event management. We’re testing it now & are very impressed! In a nutshell Event Espresso saves us money & does everything Eventbrite did before. :)” Dustin Nay
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, show planner, or event management consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, visit the user forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WP development guidelines. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive support, as so many of its satisfied clients attest:
”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 comprehensive support that includes 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to manage your events.
Event Espresso Price
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software options, however, you should consider purchasing one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This lets you set up Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license option lets you install Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one 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 specials being offered. Currently, the software sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Software For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your specific use-case, or to notify developers about problems and give feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of businesses.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run any event that requires managing dates, times and venues, booking attendees, and selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso
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