Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require managing registrations, such as workshops, group classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, networking conferences, or even a large-scale event such as a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event registrations can be a complex process. You will probably have to manage calendar schedules, dates, attendee numbers, data processing, collecting payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and alerts, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are lots of benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give you more control, create a better client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based digital presence, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create multiple events and begin processing online registrations in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online event registrations)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing systems.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software has been 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 pricing. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
More info:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages 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 web site into a fully-featured event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for participants to enrol themselves.
Letting your clients to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more of your attention on delivering a more unique event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a third party service provider. The cost is kept low by using a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add ons only if you need extra features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept online registrations outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with friends who may also be interested.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process remains entirely online, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-keeping.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the data gathered from event attendees.
Features
The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to end-users through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great features to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration. Event Espresso lets you collect specific information using custom event registration forms on your web site to prepare a great experience for your attendees.
- Customized Confirmation Email Message. Configure automatic registration and payment confirmation emails to communicate with your customers.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants so they can purchase the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary attendee’s registration information for any additional attendees.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly with pre-configured system-default ticket pricing.
- Promotional Codes. Offer promotional and discount codes to incentivize people to make a buying decision immediately, or make your offers more appealing for price-sensitive prospects. Also useful if you want to sell out events close to deadlines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event participants and confirm those who attend.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and can’t participate in your events.
- Private Comments On Contacts. Record notes about contacts on their profile. Private notes enables you to keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal observations, and how you’ve helped your contacts.
- Keyword Rich Page URLs. Keyword-rich event page Web links take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly urls with topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and improves your search rankings, helping you get more visitors to your website.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to be deployed throughout the software and your WordPress themes. Your organization fields include: business name, street address, city, state, country, zip/postal code, primary contact email address, phone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Bulk Import Events. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing capability that lets you easily upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, ticketing information, pricing, registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Event Participants. EE 4 allows a single person or an organization to book multiple attendees at the same time. You control how many people can register in a single registration by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso gives you access to a community of experienced event managers, developers, designers, marketers and business owners who also use the plugin. You can network with other Event Espresso users using their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and site visitors can tell others about your events using social sharing buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can even customize your page templates to display events in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for non-technical WordPress users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and web developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 facilitates more complex extensions and customizations to the plugin.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for regular site visitors when you need to carry out maintenance on your website. You can continue to work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their web site, Event Espresso’s aim 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 model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to significantly enhance the capabilities of the 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 your upcoming events by location. There are four maps 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 drop-down list.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template lets your users to browse for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Social Media Buttons Add on: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon is included free with any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your events in a number of exciting and interesting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart addon is suitable for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on lets you promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the experience for your attendees and design assigned seating charts and attach single prices to every seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives 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 Multi-Event Registration addon, 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 in a nice graphical calendar.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on lets you automatically register participants to a particular mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Event Espresso is so easy to use yet feature rich and stable. It is a cornerstone of our site and our success.” Fraser Barner, Speaker’s Lab
”I have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival
”Loving the functions and support from Event Espresso. One of the best plugins I’ve ever bought!” Nathan
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, seminar promoter, or event professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, visit the user forum for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its satisfied customers 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
Event Espresso provides incredible support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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 web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run your events.
Product License Price
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you should consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Licensing – This edition allows you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 site only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License Edition – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to a particular use-case, or to report errors and leave feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WP event booking and ticketing management software, used by thousands.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you intend to run events that require scheduling dates, times and venues, booking attendees, or booking seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
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