Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating bookings or registrations, such as seminars, training classes, non-profit fund raisers, corporate events, or even a big event like a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event sign-ups can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You will probably need to manage calendar schedules, dates, registration numbers, data processing and storage, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to attendees.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give event managers more control, improve user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that this can be costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin allows you to easily schedule an event and begin accepting online registrations in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Customize registration forms
You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older EE 3, as the software is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually move completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
Learn more here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits 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 existing digital presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are enabling event participants to perform the enrollment process by themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do the data themselves frees you up from doing administration and lets you spend more of your energy on planning a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service provider. This is made possible through a model where you start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase optional addons when you need extra functionality.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event registrations 24 hrs a day. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing add-ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with others who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process can be conducted entirely online, reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You control all the information you acquire from your event attendees.
Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers through built-in features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that customers can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides many built-in to website owners. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Ready to start using in no time.
- Custom Event Registration Forms. With Event Espresso you can gather specific information using custom event registration forms on your web pages to prepare a customized experience for your users.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Easily configure custom automatic registration and payment notification emails to communicate with your participants.
- Tax Administration Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you a number of ways to handle taxes for your event and provide reports of tax fee components to customers who purchase tickets. Event managers can configure taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration details for any added attendees.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing for the system-default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, create various check-in “stations” and track all attendees.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event attendees and check-in those who attend.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can attend your events.
- Private Comments On Contacts. Record notes about users on their profile and how you’ve interacted with your customers. Private notes allows you to keep records of when event participants contacted you, your internal notes, and how you’ve helped your contacts.
- Keyword Rich Event Page URLs. Keyword-rich Web links leverage your Permalinks configuration settings. “Pretty” permalinks with relevant keywords add to the context of your pages and is favored by search engines, helping you drive a more targeted audience to your events.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of all aspects of an event’s registration and ticketing, and also allows you to automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event page designs, payment processing, list waiting, attendee limits, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Exportable Information. You can output all of your data gathered from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for creating reports, planning marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WP WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily insert photos and format your event descriptions without having to know HTML or CSS, just like any WP post.
- Registrant Records. Manage each attendee’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their information organized and easily within reach.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and your website visitors can help increase exposure for your events using social share buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can even customize the templates to display events in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows you to have more control and options over the content of your event pages and how the information displays to your readers.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to create a log file with debugging data which can be useful for web developers when diagnosing errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & 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 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 comes with over 40 added features, including:
- Live-filtering when you search for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow plugin users to further enhance the functionality of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display your scheduled events by location. Four maps are currently available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Custom Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes multiple datetime events into a dropdown list.
- 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 image instead of a date.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add-on: This add-on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to share a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add-on provides PHP files that let you override certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Versions: This add-on lets you involve others in the event management process and give new users permission to create events or regional managers permission 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 privileges, allowing others to 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 areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain parts of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to allow users to have geographic responsibilities for events and users, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing addon gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add on gives you the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add-on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at the venue door. Attendees can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add-on gives event managers a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to modify the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also lets web developers build their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add-on lets you automatically register attendees to a selected mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
Plugin Users – Feedback
Below are some of the many great testimonials that 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
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
”I’m using it on multiple sites and enjoying it. It’s simple and as others have stated… fast service and real help.” Arlen Nagata
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, festival promoter, or event professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, visit the forums for useful ideas and practical ways to improve your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your event registrants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is compatible with other WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent end-user support, as many of its 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 plugin provides great support with 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 developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Software Cost
Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software functionality, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This edition allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This license option lets you configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This option allows you to 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.
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 plugin is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
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 developer when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional 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 online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your specific situation, or to report issues and give feedback.
For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of WordPress users.
If you own a WordPress website and you plan to run events that involve managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration Plugin
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