Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need managing registrations, such as seminars, training classes, charity fund raisers, corporate events, or even a large-scale event such as an arts & crafts, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complicated and time-consuming process. You need to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, attendee numbers, data collection and admin, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give you more control, create a better user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can download and install a very inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily schedule your event and begin accepting online registrations in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the 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 web site into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling participants to enrol on their own.
Letting your clients to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more of your time on organizing a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase addons when you need extra features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event sign-ups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing addons (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can remain entirely online, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You control all the information gathered from your event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its users through built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great features to website owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Ready to start accepting registrations in very little time.
- Custom Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can gather specific data using custom event registration forms on your site to create a customized experience for your users.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Registrants can easily see your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you several options to manage taxes for your event and report tax fee components to customers when purchasing tickets. You can administer taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows event managers to configure the display of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.
- Default Price Types. Price types let you create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing for your default ticket.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with three detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of participants and check-in those who have attended.
- Admin Pre-approval. Control who can register for your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of engagement to your event pages by allowing potential registrants to interact with you online via commenting and past attendees to post reviews that can help others choose whether or not to register. Moderation settings for comments are set up using the WordPress default commenting system.
- Keyword Rich URLs. Keyword-rich URLs leverage your WP Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly permalinks that include relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you get a more targeted audience to your website.
- Country Settings. Event managers 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, etc.
- Exportable Information. You can export all of your data gathered from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for creating reports, implementing new marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Register Multiple Event Participants. EE 4 allows a single person or people to enroll multiple participants simultaneously. Event managers decide how many attendees can enrol in a single registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you network with an expert community of experienced event managers and plugin users. You can network with other members of the Event Espresso community through their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your site visitors can help spread the word about your event using social media share buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can even customize your page templates to display events in your own unique way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over your events and how your information displays to your readers.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reconfigure the user interface to match your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely deleted from the workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Addons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to further enhance the capabilities of your event management process.
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 the event does not have a featured image available, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events manager add on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can create as many events in the future as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all 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 show the event thumbnail instead of the date.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon is included free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files add on provides PHP files that let you override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Editions: This add-on lets you involve other 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 WordPress users roles and allow them different permissions with different capabilities, so your staff can help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections 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.
- Multiple Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your 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 cart. With the Multiple Event Registration add on, 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 View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on provides event managers with an easy-to-use system that lets you change the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also lets developers design custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- JSON API Add on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add-on allows other 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 the software, including new add-ons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Below are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
”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
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, event planner, or event consultant, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the forums for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management process and improve the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive end-user support, as many of its clients 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 Event Espresso software provides robust support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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 count on to run your events.
Product Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you may want to consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This edition lets you install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This edition allows you to configure Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
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 Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about problems and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of WordPress website owners.
If you own a WordPress web site and you intend to run events that involve managing dates and venues (offline and online), booking participants, or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Software
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