Does your company currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings, such as seminars, training classes, charity fund raisers, corporate events, or even a big event such as a music festival, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You need to manage calendar schedules, available dates and seating allocations, attendee numbers, data collection, payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event participants.
There are lots 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 duplicate previous events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-based website, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily set up your event and start receiving online registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to enable future growth. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into an automated and feature-rich event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are facilitating participants to perform the registration by themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you spend more of your energy on organizing a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party service. The cost is kept low by using a model where Event Espresso users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy optional add-ons only when you need added functionality.
- More Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online sign-ups outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process remains entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the data acquired from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso plugin provides functionality to its customers through standard features (these come with the software) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of built-in to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration. With Event Espresso you can gather specific data using custom event registration forms on your site to plan a customized experience for your event participants.
- Customizable Event Designs. Create the look and feel you want for your events and registrations page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and elements, as well as HTML and CSS.
- Tax Admin & Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you several ways to administer taxes for your event and report tax fee components to customers who purchase tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally or on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and display attendee details throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily by pre-configuring system-default ticket pricing.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 provides 3 detailed in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to know who your clients are and how they’ve done business with you.
- No Ticket Events. You can list events without the requirement for participants to select tickets. Use Event Espresso for any kind of event, not only when tickets are for sale.
- Event RSS Feeds. Provide automatic updates to customers, drive quality traffic and expand your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft Events. Draft events let you develop an event over multiple sessions without displaying it live on your website. You can continue building your events until you are ready to take things live, or schedule to publish your event page at a later date and time.
- Complete Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in full control of every aspect of your event’s registration and ticketing, and also lets you automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event designs, payment processing, wait lists, attendee limits, print-ready tickets and more.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for most of your events, you can set up as your default ticket for the next event simply by checking a box.
- Event Venue Profiles. The venue management feature in Event Espresso 4 allows details about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform attendees of your event’s location. The venue record has many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you republish details like venue capacity, venue web address, phone number, physical, maps, etc. You can also list venues on different sections of your WP theme as well as on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a specific venue.
- Attendee Profiles. You can manage each customer’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily within reach.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your website visitors can tell others about your event using social share buttons.
- Accurate Event Participant Management. You have control of your attendees’ details; who has enrolled, for what event and how much they’ve paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of event attendees to a CSV file for additional reports, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your customers on a person-by-person basis or as a group.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows web developers to have more control and options over your event pages and how the information displays to visitors.
- Control Box Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WP user interface, which brings the ability to reorder the user interface to match your workflow processes. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from the page.
- 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 company operates on a modular and efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes registrant data in confirmation emails and email updates.
- Default surcharge (similar to applying a service tax to tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Add ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to significantly expand the functionality of your event management process.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display all scheduled events by location. 4 maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Date Range Template Addon: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to browse for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: This add-on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your event lists in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Versions: This add-on lets you include staff in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the ability 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 privileges, 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 areas 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.
- Event Ticketing Add on: The Ticketing add-on adds the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. Attendees can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories using an attractive graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration Addon: The MailChimp addon allows you to automatically register participants to a specific 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 latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that users have posted about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”I am in love with your product, I work with many educational institutions that hold classes/events and I will definitely recommend this to all of them, the only time I have seen a system this comprehensive and sophisticated is when an organization I worked with paid a programmer nearly $8,000 for a custom solution, and yet still there are features in your registration system that his didn’t have. Thank you so much for your help and patience.” Abdullah J.
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, concert promoter, or event consultant, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, search the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process or enhance the experience of your event customers.
Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and WP themes that follow WordPress coding standards. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as many of its customers confirm:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
The Event Espresso plugin provides incredible support including access to a support forum, 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can rely on to run your events.
Plugin Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This edition lets you install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license option enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This lets you configure Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of 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 amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
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.
Search the plugin’s online documentation pages for answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to report issues and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product web site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run any event that involves scheduling dates and venues, enrolling participants, and selling seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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