Do you currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings or registrations, such as seminars, training classes, not-for-profit fund-raisers, social conferences, or even a large-scale event like a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complex process. You may need to manage scheduling, availability, participant numbers, data collection and storage, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to attendees.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for similar 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 quite costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based website or blog, you can install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration System For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create an event and start accepting online bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and receive online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket sales, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform has been redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software 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 learn more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price options 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 practically eliminating the need to process registrations and sign-ups manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for attendees to enrol on their own.
Letting your clients to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you direct more of your time on planning a better event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your participants to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Significantly Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party provider. This is made possible through a model where you buy the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase addons only if you need added functionality.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new event sign-ups outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested.
- Green Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process remains wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Data. You own all the data you collect from event participants.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great built-in to WP users. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Ready to use in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration. Event Espresso lets you collect specific data using a custom event registration form on your site to prepare a tailored experience for your attendees.
- Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides several ways to administer taxes for an event and provide reports of tax fee components to registrants who purchase tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and reuse registrant data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events fast by pre-configuring default ticket prices.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. Set up promotional and discount codes to incentivize people to make a buying decision immediately, or make your events more affordable for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical if you want to increase sales of events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how you’ve previously engaged with them. Your Contact Profile section stores updated records like the name, biography, contact details, event registration information, private comments, etc. about each customer.
- No Ticket Events. Promote events without the requirement for participants to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for all forms of events, not just when tickets are required.
- RSS Event Feeds. Provide automatic updates to users, drive quality traffic and reach a wider audience with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to build your event page at your own leisure without displaying it live on your website. You can work on your event until you are ready to publish it on your website, or schedule your event page to publish at a future date and time.
- Complete Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in full control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing, and also lets you automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event page designs, payment processing and handling, list waiting, attendee limits, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Exportable Data. You can output all the information gathered from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, devising new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WP Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily add graphic images and write your event descriptions without having to learn HTML or CSS, just like any typical WordPress post or page.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you engage with a community of experienced event managers, programmers, designers, marketers and businesses who also use the plugin. You can engage with other members of the Event Espresso community via their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential customers who have not fully paid for their registration with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click. Your invoices will reference pre-registered attendees who have not paid their registration in full by name, give them the amount they owe, and include a link to the event details, a payment link and a url to download the invoice.
- Accurate Event Attendee Management. You have control of your customers’ records; who has registered, which event they have registered for and how much they 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 an attendee list to a CSV file for additional reports, send custom payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your registrants on a person-by-person basis or collectively.
Extra features include:
- Hooks, Actions And Filters. These features allow web developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are 100% compatible with WordPress.
- Control Box Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to organize the user interface to suit your workflow. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from your workflow configuration.
- Autonomy, Flexibility And Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their web site, Event Espresso’s goal 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 and highly effective 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 added features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the work of re-entering event details when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service fee to each ticket).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow software users to significantly expand the capabilities of managing an event.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display the scheduled events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Add-on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories as a simple list. Clicking a category name shows all events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can also 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 WP user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the website can have access to your special events. Members can also add personal information into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Users can also view event history and pay for new events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Editions: This add-on lets you involve other users in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and give them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing staff 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 areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts 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.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives potential customers 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 Calendar Addon: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and event categories using a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing plugin add on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
For complete details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
User Testimonials
Here are some of the many great testimonials that users have written about Event Espresso:
”Broadcasting my support for Event Espresso will be a pleasure. I recently helped the Webmaster at a sister church configure your event manager for their site, so I can say with confidence and from experience, that Event Espresso is the best Event Manager plugin ever!” Philip Simpson, The Charlotte Church
“I just completed my first event using Event Espresso. I really believe without Event Espresso my event would not have been the success it was.” Cathy Earle, Women Only Weekend
”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! 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 (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, teacher, concert planner, or event management professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time researching the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as many of its satisfied plugin clients 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
Event Espresso provides great support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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 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 run your events.
Event Espresso Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you should consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License Edition – This license allows you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
Please Note: The pricing above was current when 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
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.
Search the software’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to report bugs and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of WP website owners.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you plan to run any event that requires managing dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable WP plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration Plugin
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