Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings or registrations, such as workshops, group classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, corporate conferences, or even a large-scale event such as a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Managing event sign-ups is a complex process. You will most likely need to co-ordinate event schedules, availability, attendee numbers, data processing and storage, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event participants.
There are a number of advantages to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give you more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based site, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily schedule an event and begin processing online registrations in just minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso is transitioning between 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 enable future expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read 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 site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for event participants to enroll on their own.
Allowing your customers to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more time on delivering a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon learn, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso gives you a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service provider. This is made possible through a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add-ons when you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new event registrations 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process is conducted wholly online, reducing traditional paper waste from tasks associated with administration.
- Own Your Information. You own all the information gathered from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to users via standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many unique features to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and implement. Ready to start using in very little time.
- Customized Event Registration Form. With Event Espresso you can collect specific data using custom event registration forms on your site to create a great experience for your users.
- Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. Match your site’s design for your events and bookings page using Event Espresso’s limitless template options and parts, plus HTML or CSS.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospective registrants so they can purchase the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WP theme and reuse registrant data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing for the system-default ticket.
- Discount Codes. Offer promotional and discount codes to incentivize prospects to make a buying decision now, or make your offers more appealing for price-sensitive prospects. Also useful for helping to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of registrants and check-in those who have attended.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has become completely sold out. Additionally, you can make it a requirement wait-list members pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of social sharing to your event pages by allowing potential attendees to ask questions about your event and past customers to post feedback that can help others choose whether or not to register. Moderation settings for public commenting are set up using the WP commenting settings.
- Keyword-Rich Page URLs. Keyword rich event page URLs take advantage of your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly urls that include topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you bring more potential customers to your site.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to display throughout Event Espresso and your WP themes. Organization fields include: organization name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, primary contact email address, telephone number, tax number, business logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Exportable Data. You can export all of your information gathered from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for creating advanced reports, devising marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, etc..
- Multiple Event Participant. Event Espresso 4 allows a single person or people to register multiple participants at once. You can control how many people are allowed to enrol in a single registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you engage with a community of experienced event managers, programmers, 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 Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Categorize Events. If you have a number of types of events such as free and paid, workshops and mastermind sessions, different kinds of courses, etc. you can categorize these to help event attendees to locate what they’re searching for. You can display all events in a category on an event category page, make the events searchable by category, and color-code your events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, in addition to suggesting new events in the categories that interest your existing customers.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over your event page content and how the information displays to your prospects.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you generate a log file with debugging data that can be useful for web developers when potential problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And 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 objectives, the software has been built using a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the work of re-entering event details when adding new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a series of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an amazing number of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow software users to significantly expand the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- 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 an event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager Add on: The Recurring Events manager add on allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add-on: The Date Range custom event list template allows your users to search 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 allows your attendees to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add on provides PHP files that allow you to bypass certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Versions: This addon lets you involve staff in the event management process 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 WordPress users roles and allow them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing staff to help you manage your events or events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WP 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 add on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing add on adds the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at the door. Attendees can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template addon provides event managers with an easy-to-use system that allows you to modify the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also enables developers to design custom templates using one of the templates provided as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp addon allows you to auto-register participants to a chosen mailing autoresponder list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin, including new add-ons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website:
Testimonials
Below are some of the many great testimonials that 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
”Customizing an Event Registration plugin for WordPress by @EventEspresso. Love the pro version. Highly Recommended!” Joshua Garity
”Just bought an Event Espresso license for an upcoming conference website we are working on. The custom registration forms functionality rocks!” Eric Sopp, Inside Design
Useful Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, show promoter, or event management professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, go through the support forum for new ideas and practical ways to streamline your event management workflow and improve the experience of your event attendees.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its plugin users 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
The plugin provides great support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, premium 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 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 Cost
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin options, however, you may want to consider downloading one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you set up Event Espresso on five domains. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Current pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The pricing above was current at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands.
If you are a WordPress user and you intend to run any event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues, registering participants, and/or selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso
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