Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings, such as workshops, group courses, non-profit fundraisers, marketing functions, or even a large-scale event like a rave party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a time-consuming process. You need to manage event schedules, availability, participant numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event participants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an automated web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate previous events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be very expensive.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can install an inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Software For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up an event and start processing online registrations in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso is transitioning between two different versions of their software: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older EE 3, as it has been redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim 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.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the 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 event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to enroll themselves.
Letting your participants to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you direct more attention on creating a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Additional benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: Event Espresso provides you with an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a third party provider. This is made possible through a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add ons when you need added functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online sign-ups 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process remains wholly online, reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information you collect from your event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to users through built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many features to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you gather unique data using a custom event registration form on your site to prepare a great experience for your attendees.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Attendees can easily see your events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of options to handle taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fees to registrants who purchase tickets. You can administer taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and display events information throughout other areas of your site.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the likelihood of spamming and bot software programs creating bogus registrations with reCAPTCHA settings to provide human authentication.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track all attendees.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of registering event participants when they show up, or send in paper-based forms for manual registration later.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can join a waiting list if your event has become sold out. Additionally, you can make it a requirement waiting list members pre-pay if you plan to expand capacity for your event.
- Private Contact Commenting. Record notes about event registrants on their profile and how you’ve helped your contacts. Private notes lets you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have interacted with your customers.
- Keyword-Rich URLs. Keyword rich event page Web links take advantage of your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly web links that have relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your site.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to be deployed throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. Your organization fields include: business name, address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, email address, phone number, tax number, company logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for most of your events, you can easily set up as your default ticket for the next event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Venue Manager. The venue manager in EE 4 allows details about venues to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your website to inform potential participants of the location of your event. The venue profile has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes details like venue capacity, venue site URL, telephone number, venue location details, location map, etc. You can also display all of your venues throughout various sections on your WordPress theme and on a venue archive page on your website where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a specific venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you engage with a community of experienced event managers, developers, web designers, marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Member Manager. Save time and stay organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Accurate Event Participant Manager. You control your customers’ details; who has enrolled, for what event and how much they paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of attendees to a CSV file for additional uses, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your event participants on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This feature allows developers to have more control and options over your event page content and how the information displays to visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for regular site traffic whenever site maintenance is needed. You can continue to work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- 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 goals, the software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the work of re-entering event data when creating new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a comprehensive number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow plugin users to further enhance the capabilities of the event management system.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display scheduled events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events manager addon lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can add as many future events as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
- 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 also be customized to display the event thumbnail image instead of a date.
- Social Coupons Integration Add-on: If your 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.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered website users will have access to these special events. Members can also store personal data into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also look up previous events and pay for future events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add-on is suitable for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues directly from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to every seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives potential attendees the ability to book 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 shopping 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.
- Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add on provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to edit 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 enables web developers to design their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add on allows you to automatically register participants to a chosen mailing autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Here are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”When you can get a company to expend more money switching systems just to use your plugin…you’ve really accomplished something.” David, House of Prayer
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, seminar promoter, or event professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the support forum for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process or improve the experience of your event attendees.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with most WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent customer support, as so many of its clients confirm:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
The software provides comprehensive support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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.
Additionally, 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 depend on to manage your events.
Plugin Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you will want to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you run Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about issues and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of businesses.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues, booking participants, and reserving tickets or seating, 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 Management & Registration System For WordPress
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