Does your business currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating registrations, such as seminars, community classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, marketing functions, or even a big event like a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complex and time-consuming process. You will probably need to manage event schedules, dates, attendee numbers, data collection and admin, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, 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 lower expenses, help you easily reproduce recurring events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be very costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can install a very inexpensive and professional web-based event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily schedule multiple events and begin processing online registrations literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online event bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use several event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides 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 it 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 pricing. The company plans to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about the benefits and advantages of this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
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 website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally doing away with the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are enabling participants to perform the registration process themselves.
Allowing your participants to do all of the data entry frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your resources on creating a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you a very inexpensive 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 needs of most users) and then purchase add ons only when you need additional features.
- More Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event registrations outside traditional business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event share your information with their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event booking process is conducted entirely online, significantly reducing traditional paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You control all the information you obtain from event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to end-users via standard features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of great features to site owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Multiple Dates and Times Per Event. In EE 4, events can have multiple dates and times (called datetimes), and these can be managed from one single event.
- WordPress Event Calendar. Attendees can easily find your upcoming events and add these to their schedule using the WordPress calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with payment gateways, allowing you to collect money before running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables event managers to configure the settings of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Spam Protection. Eliminate the chance of spammers and bots creating fake registrations on your site with reCAPTCHA features that authenticate human activity.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 provides three built-in in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event participants and confirm those who attend.
- Ticketless Events. Create events without requiring participants to select tickets. Event Espresso can be used for all types of events, not just those that need tickets.
- Private Commenting On Contacts. Record comments about contacts on their profile and how you’ve interacted with your customers. Private commenting allows you to keep records of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you’ve interacted with them.
- Optimized For The Most Up-To-Date WordPress Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you create beautifully-designed event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in complete control of every aspect of an event’s registration and ticketing processes, and also lets you automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event page designs, payment processing and handling, list waiting, attendee limits, printable tickets and more.
- Import Events. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that enables you to upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import information about events, datetimes, tickets, pricing, custom registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the built-in WordPress Visual editor, allowing you to quickly and easily insert graphic images and format your content without having to learn HTML or CSS, just like any WP post or page.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso provides users with access to a community of experienced event managers, web developers, web designers, digital marketers and businesses who also use the plugin. You can interact 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 keep your information organized by reusing staff 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.
- Transaction Reports. Quick-view event reports provides you with data of all the registrations and transactions, enabling you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue you have collected.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for basic users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 allows for more complex extensions and customizations to the software.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for normal website traffic when you need to make updates on your site. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: According to the mission statement on their website, 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 mission, the software has been built using a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.
The premium version of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes customer data in notification emails and newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a group of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page during registration.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow you to significantly enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these addons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Addon: The Vector Maps custom events list template lets you display upcoming events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes many datetime events into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template shows categories as a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows the events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- 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 any of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon lets you take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered site users will have access to your special events. Members can also store personal details 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 view previous events and pay for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Versions: This add-on lets you include others in your organization to help manage your events 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 assign them different permissions with different privileges, so others can help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain parts of your WP dashboard and/or certain parts 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 add-on gives potential customers the ability to book 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 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.
- Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add-on provides event managers with a simple and easy-to-use system that lets you 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 enables web developers to design custom templates using one of the templates included as a base template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software addon, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture customer data, track enrollments, and accept payments from your website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Customer Feedback
Here are just some of the testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”EventEspresso saves us money, saves our secretary 16-24 hours and looks so professionally done that people ask us how we do it; which we happily tell them, “Event Espresso, and be sure to get the ticketing add-on.”” David, House of Prayer
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
”I’m so excited to fire Eventbrite! Event Espresso has an amazing WP plugin for event management. We’re testing it now & are very impressed! In a nutshell Event Espresso saves us money & does everything Eventbrite did before. :)” Dustin Nay
Plugin Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, seminar promoter, or event management consultant, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the forums for new ideas and practical suggestions to improve your event management process and enhance the experience of your registrants.
Product Support
Event Espresso works with with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as so many of its clients attest:
”It’s magical. Support is amazing, plugin is simple to use, a 3 year old could use the iPhone app…it all is very impressive and professional.” David, House of Prayer
The plugin provides great support including access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, priority 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 a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can rely on to manage your events.
Software Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software options, however, you need to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license enables you to set up Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 1 domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license option enables you to install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the plugin is selling for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current price: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing 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 website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin Info
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 plugin’s online documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to a specific situation, or to notify developers about problems and share feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product information pages.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of businesses.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you currently run any event that requires managing dates and venues, booking participants, or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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