Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need handling registrations, such as workshops, training courses, charity fundraisers, social functions, or even a big event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event sign-ups is a time-consuming process. You will most likely need to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, registration numbers, data administration, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event participants.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily duplicate recurring events, give event managers more control, create a better customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can easily install an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up multiple events and start accepting registrations literally in minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually phase out 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 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 current website or blog into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to attendee limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually doing away with the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are facilitating participants to enroll themselves.
Allowing your customers to do the data entry frees up your time and lets you spend more of your attention on delivering a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum by using a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase add ons when you need new features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new signups outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with other people they know who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process is performed wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information collected from your event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to end-users through standard features (these come with the software) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Ready to start accepting registrations in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to create multiple ticket types and specify prices, number of tickets, and more.
- Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. Customize your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and components, and HTML and/or CSS.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 provides several options to administer taxes for an event and report tax fee components to registrants when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to configure the display of Google Maps on your event listing and event details sections.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the default ticket price for the default ticket.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 comes with three useful in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of attendees and check in those who have attended.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached maximum capacity. Additionally, you can specify that wait-list members pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- Public Commenting. Add social interactivity to your events pages by encouraging potential attendees to interact with you online via commenting and previous participants to post feedback that can help others decide whether or not to register. Moderation settings for public commenting are configured via the WP commenting system.
- SEO Friendly URLs. Keyword-rich Web links take advantage of your WordPress site’s Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” permalinks with topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you get a more targeted audience to your events.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- Event Venue Management. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 allows information about a venue to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your website to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue profile has many of the standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays venue information such as venue capacity, venue website, venue phone number, venue address, Google map, etc. You can also list all of your venues on specific locations in your WordPress theme as well as on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have listed for a given venue.
- Attendee Profiles. You can manage your registrant’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your site visitors can help publicize your event using social media share buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different types of events such as free and paid, conference speakers and breakout sessions, different types of exercise classes, etc. you can categorize these to help event registrants to locate what they’re looking for. You can display all events in a category on a custom event category page, make events searchable by category, and colour-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, as well as suggesting other events in the categories that interest your existing customers.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for most WordPress users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 facilitates more complex extensions and customizations to the plugin.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which brings the ability to reorganize the user interface to match your workflow. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And 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 model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 additional features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events in the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a comprehensive array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to further expand the capabilities of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Addon: 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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events management addon lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many events in advance as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows the categories as a simple list. Clicking a category name displays all events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- 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 Files Add on: The Custom Files add-on lets you bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add-on lets you include staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and assign them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing others 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 parts 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 Add on: The Multi-Event registration addon gives your potential attendees the ability to register for 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 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 Calendar Add-on: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and event categories in a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp add-on allows you to automatically register participants to a particular 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 addons.
For more details about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are a few of the testimonials that satisfied plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”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, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
”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 a motivational speaker, presenter, show promoter, or event professional, 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 registered user, go through the forums for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management and registration workflow or enhance the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as many of its satisfied plugin end-users confirm:
”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
The Event Espresso software provides comprehensive support that includes access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, one-on-one 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 a well-staffed team of experienced 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.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider using one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license option lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the website.
Additional Plugin Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’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 particular situation, or to report problems and share feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run any event that requires managing dates, times and venues, enrolling participants, and selling tickets, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
To learn more, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration Software
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