Do you currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings, such as workshops, group courses, not-for-profit fund raisers, networking conferences, 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 book to attend?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a time-consuming process. You need to co-ordinate calendar schedules, availability, participant numbers, data collection and admin, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate previously-run 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 own a WordPress-powered web site, you can easily set up an inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily schedule your event and start processing online bookings in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and accept online registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing systems.
View detailed information about event attendees
Important: 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 impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into an automated and feature-rich event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to enroll themselves.
Letting your clients to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you invest more attention on creating a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your clients to experience.
Some additional benefits include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy addons when you need added features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new sign-ups 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with other people they know who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process can remain entirely online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you acquire from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users via standard features (these are included with the software) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many great built-in to website owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in very little time.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), and these can be managed from a single event.
- Customized Notification Email Message. Easily configure automatic booking and payment notification email messages to communicate with your clients.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with several payment gateways, allowing you to collect money before running your events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WordPress theme and display events data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events fast by pre-configuring default ticket pricing.
- Discount Codes. Offer promotion and multiple discount codes to encourage visitors to take action without delays, or make your events more affordable for others. This is also practical if you want to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of event participants and check-in everyone who has attended.
- Ticketless Events. List events without the requirement for registrants to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for all kinds of events, not only those that need tickets.
- RSS Event Feeds. Keep your blog visitors updated about your events, drive quality traffic and widen your content reach with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Keyword-Rich Event Page Web Links. Keyword-rich event page Web links leverage your WordPress site’s Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” urls with relevant keywords add to the context of your events and is favored by search engines, helping you bring more visitors to your site.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your profile to be used throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates. The organization data include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, primary contact email address, phone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Bulk Upload Events. EE 4 provides an advanced importing feature that enables you to upload a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, ticketing information, pricing, custom registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Event Venue Manager. The venue manager feature in EE 4 allows information about venues to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your website to inform users of your event’s location. The venue profile displays many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays information such as venue capacity, venue website, venue phone number, physical, map, etc. You can also display all of your venues in specific parts in your WordPress theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and reuse venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a specific venue.
- Automatic Upgrading. Event Espresso provides easy 1-click updating to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation working with new versions of WordPress.
- Team Member Manager. Save time and keep your information organized by reusing staff member profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as staff member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can even customize the page templates to display event information in your own custom way.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your event page and how the information displays to visitors.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data that can be useful for developers when troubleshooting.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the mission statement on their site, Event Espresso’s objective is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their goals, the company operates on a modular and efficient model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes attendee data in confirmation emails and newsletters.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service fee to tickets).
- Default payment status.
Add-Ons
In addition to an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to significantly expand the functionality of managing your event.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add-on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display scheduled events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with multiple datetimes into a drop-down list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template shows event categories in a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows all events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your web site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- Custom Template Add on: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your events in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Editions: This addon lets you involve other users in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity 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 capabilities, so your staff can help you manage your events or the 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 parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to control factors geographically for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration addon gives potential customers the ability to register for 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 Multi-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.
- EE4 Events Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track registrations, and accept payments from your website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Below are some of the testimonials that satisfied users have posted about Event Espresso:
”It’s been very comprehensive and covers exactly the aspects of event registration that we needed for our site plus some features that we didn’t even need but could still use in the future. Very Excellent Plugin!” Tristan Hall, Area 12:2 Youth Group
”Event Espresso event management plugin for WordPress is really an awesome plugin.” Cheryl Smithem, Charleston PR & Design
”Loving the functions and support from Event Espresso. One of the best plugins I’ve ever bought!” Nathan
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, workshop promoter, or event consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time going through the user forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration workflow or improve the experience of your participants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WP coding guidelines. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great end-user support, as so many of its satisfied plugin clients attest:
”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm
The Event Espresso software provides incredible support including access to support forums, in-depth 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to organize and manage your events.
Software Price
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Edition – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This option enables you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This enables you to set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing 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 author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your specific situation, or to report bugs and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands.
If you own a WordPress web site and you currently run any event that involves managing dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, or reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management System
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