Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that require managing bookings or registrations, such as workshops, community classes, non-profit fund raisers, social events, or even a big event such as a trade show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings is a complex process. You need to manage scheduling, date availability, attendee numbers, data collection, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to participants.
There are many benefits to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and lower expenses, help you easily copy settings for similar events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that this can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can easily install a very inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Presenting …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create multiple events and begin processing online bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Customize your event registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: EE 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is significantly different than the older EE 3, as it is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for 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 Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits
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
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 pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Basically, you are enabling event attendees to perform the registration on their own.
Letting your enrollees to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you spend more of your energy on delivering a better event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third party provider. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and purchase addons only when you need new functionality.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online signups any time of day or night. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features and addons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event signup process can remain entirely online, reducing typical paper waste from tasks associated with enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the data you obtain from your event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great built-in to WP users. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), that these can be managed from one single event.
- Custom Notification Emails. Easily set up custom automatic registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with your customers.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, allowing you to collect booking payments prior to running your events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s details for any additional attendees.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the chance of spammers and bot software programs making bogus registrations on your website by using reCAPTCHA tools that confirm human activity.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track all participants.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event participants when they show up, or sending in paper-based registration forms for manual submission later.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective attendees can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached maximum attendance. You can also make it a requirement waiting list attendees pre-pay if you plan to add more capacity for your event.
- Private Contact Commenting. Keep comments about a contact on their profile. Private notes enables you to keep records of when event participants contacted you, your internal notes, and how you have interacted with your contacts.
- Keyword-Rich Page URLs. Keyword-rich event page URLs take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” permalinks with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you drive more potential customers to your events.
- Full Control Of Your Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and allows you to automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event page designs, payment processing, wait lists, attendee limits, printable tickets and more.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for your new events simply by checking a box.
- Multiple Participant Bookings. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or an organization to register multiple attendees at once. Event managers decide how many people can register in a single registration session by specifying either limits 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, web marketers and business owners who also use the software. You can engage with other Event Espresso users through 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 member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Transaction Reports. Event reporting provides you with information of all of your registrations and transactions, enabling you to measure the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and amount of revenue you’ve collected.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for general WordPress users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 allows for more complex enhancements and customizations to the software.
- Metabox Management & Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to reorder the user interface to match your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or deleted from the workflow configuration.
- 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 mission, the company operates on a modular and effective model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the work of re-entering event details when creating new events.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service tax to tickets).
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Add ons
As well as a very large number of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to further expand the capabilities of managing your event.
Some of these addons include:
- EE4 Events Grid Template Addon: 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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that occur in a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Addon: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after registration.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site will have access to these special events. Members can also store personal details into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also view previous events and make payment for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Versions: This add on lets you include staff 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 privileges, so others can help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WP dashboard and/or certain areas 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 Addon: The Multi-Event registration addon gives potential attendees 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 Multiple 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 event categories in a nice graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add on: The new Event Espresso JSON API addon lets other software applications, online tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso details through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Here are just some of the testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:
”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
“Love the plugin, we only use it once a year for a race we have in February. This saved us tons of time in data entry. In addition, we had more runners register than any other year. We attribute that to the ease of registering online. Thanks for your work.” Ed, Friends of Oscar Scherer Park
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, show promoter, or event management professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered user, go through the user forum for useful ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration workflow and enhance the experience of your attendees.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with other WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive user support, as many of its satisfied plugin users 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 exceptional support including access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledge base 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 web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you need to consider purchasing one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This lets you run Event Espresso on 1 site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license allows you to install Event Espresso on five domains. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Current pricing for 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 being retailed for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current when this article was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about issues and leave feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used and trusted by thousands of WP website owners.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you intend to run an event that involves managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management System
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