Do you currently run or plan to run events that require handling registrations, such as workshops, community courses, charity fund raisers, social conferences, or even a big event like an exhibition, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Managing event registrations is a complex process. You will most likely have to co-ordinate scheduling, dates, attendee numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and providing tickets to event attendees.
There are a number of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily reproduce recurring events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based site, you can set up an inexpensive and professional online event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily schedule multiple events and begin processing online bookings in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can employ several event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your participants, or integrating your event bookings with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin has been redeveloped using a different structure to enable future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually migrate completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
More info:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are facilitating participants to perform the enrollment process themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you spend more time on organizing a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and booking process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a third-party service provider. The cost is kept low through a model where users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy addons only when you need added functionality.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept new event bookings outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign up process can remain entirely online, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks associated with admin and record-storage.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information gathered from event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its customers through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great built-in to site owners. Here are just some:
- Quick and simple to install and implement. Ready to use in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso allows you to create multiple ticket types and specify different prices, ticket quantity limits, etc.
- Customized Notification Emails. Configure automated registration and payment notification email messages to communicate with your registrants.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to prospects so they can choose the ticket(s) that best fits their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically copy the primary attendee’s registration information for any added participants.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast with pre-configured system-default ticket pricing.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track your attendees.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of attendees and check-in those who attend.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective participants can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached capacity. Additionally, you can specify that wait-list registrants pre-pay if you plan to expand capacity for your event.
- Private Comments On Contacts. Keep notes about users 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 them.
- SEO Friendly Event Page URLs. Keyword rich event page URLs take advantage of your WP site’s Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” urls that use topic-relevant keywords add to the context of your pages 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 be used throughout the software and your WP themes. Organization information include: organization name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email, telephone, VAT/tax number, company logo, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram URL.
- Exportable Data. You can output all of your data gathered from your event customers into Excel or CSV format for producing reports, planning marketing strategies, reviewing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Register Multiple Event Participants. EE 4 allows one person or people to enroll multiple attendees at once. Event managers can control how many attendees can enroll in one booking session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso gives you access to an expert community of experienced event managers and plugin users. You can network with other Event Espresso users using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and website visitors can help create a wider exposure for your events using social media share buttons.
- Event Reporting. Quick-view event reporting gives you data of the registrations and transactions, enabling you to analyze the performance of your events with the aggregate number of people who have registered and how much money has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for most users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 makes possible more complex extensions and customizations to the plugin.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for normal site visitors when you need to make updates on your site. You can continue to work on your content during maintenance mode.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their website, 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 that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – simplifies the work of re-entering event details when adding new events.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Addons
As well as a comprehensive array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow customers to further expand the capabilities of your event management process.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display scheduled events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events manager addon allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months ahead. You can add as many events in the future as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Add-on: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can also be customized to display the event thumbnail instead of the date.
- Social Media Buttons Addon: The social media addon displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media add-on is included free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on allows you to take advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices 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 enter personal information into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event booking form. Your users can also look up previous events and make payment for events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart add on is great for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress site. The Seating Chart addon lets you control the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing addon adds the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the ability to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at the door. Customers can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories via an attractive graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software add on, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture registrant data, track registrations, and accept payments from your web site.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Here are some of the testimonials that satisfied plugin users have written 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
”I searched long and hard to find something that would serve my needs. This is, by far, the most complete and comprehensive solution I have found.” Bill Hepper, We Teach Live
”You guys have done an AWESOME job with this system…promise me to keep up the excellent work you guys are doing, for as long as you can… Respect!” Robert Jarnroth, Jarnroth Digital Productions
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, presenter, concert promoter, or event management consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the user forum for tips and practical ways to streamline your event management and registration workflow and improve the experience of your registrants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as many of its users attest:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
Event Espresso provides incredible support with access to support forums, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in different plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you need to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license allows you to install Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This license enables you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Edition – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons 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 specials being offered. Presently, the software sells for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding 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 setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about errors and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run events that involve scheduling dates, times and venues, registering attendees, or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
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