Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as seminars, community classes, not-for-profit fund raisers, corporate functions, 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?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups is a complex process. You have to co-ordinate calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data processing and storage, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event registrants.
There are a number of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce costs, help you easily duplicate previously-run events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable client experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking system.
Presenting …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Plugin
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily set up an event and start accepting online registrations literally in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online registrations)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ a range of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing updates.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as it is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The EE 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 this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Automated Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing digital presence into a fully-featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for event attendees to enrol by themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you concentrate more attention on delivering a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd party service. This is made possible by using a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and buy add ons when you need new features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event bookings outside normal business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing features and add ons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite their friends who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign Up Process: With Event Espresso, the event sign-up process is transacted wholly online, significantly reducing typical paper waste from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You own all the data you acquire from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to its users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers a number of built-in to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Ready to start accepting registrations in no time.
- Customized Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you gather specific data using custom event registration forms on your site to plan a customized experience for your users.
- Custom Notification Emails. Set up automatic registration and payment notification emails to communicate with event customers.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, enabling you to collect registration fees before running the events.
- Custom Post Types. Integrate Event Espresso into your theme and display attendee data throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Create events quickly and easily by pre-configuring system-default ticket prices.
- In-App Documentation. Event Espresso 4 provides three comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees at the door, or sending in paper-based forms for manual submission later.
- Admin Pre-approval. Be selective about who can and cannot attend your events.
- Public Commenting. Add social a new level of interaction to your event by encouraging potential prospects to ask questions about your event and past participants to post comments that can help others decide whether or not to enroll. Moderation settings for public commenting are set up in the WP commenting settings.
- Keyword Rich Event Page URLs. Keyword rich URLs take advantage of your WordPress Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly permalinks with topic-relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you bring a more targeted audience to your events.
- Your Organization Settings. Configure your organization’s profile to be deployed throughout the software and your WP themes. Your organization information include: organization name, address, city, state, country, zip code, email, phone, VAT/tax number, your logo, Facebook profile URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ URL, Instagram URL.
- Default Tickets. If you create identical tickets for many of your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Event Venue Management. The venue management feature in Event Espresso 4 lets information about a venue to display throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front-end of your site to inform site visitors of the location of your event. The venue profile has many of the standard WordPress settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also includes venue details such as venue capacity, venue web address, telephone number, physical and virtual location, location map, etc. You can also list all of your event venues in specific parts in your WP theme and on a venue listing page on your site where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a particular venue.
- Attendee Records. Manage your customer’s profiles and payment history and keep all of their information organized.
- Staff Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying profile information such as team member’s contact information, resume and photo using a shortcode in an event description.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can also customize the page templates to display event information in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for most users, and also extremely robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 permits more complex enhancements and customizations to the application.
- Metabox Management And Reorganization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reorder the user interface to suit your workflow. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely removed from your workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And Value: According to the mission statement on their website, Event Espresso’s goal is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their objectives, the software has been built using a modular and highly effective 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 over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes that includes customer data in confirmation emails and email newsletters.
- Question groups that simplify the process of reusing a group of questions for similar events.
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
In addition to a very large array of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to further enhance the capabilities of your 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 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Manager Add-on: The Recurring Events manager add on lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in the future as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all recurring events.
- Events Calendar Table Template Addon: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to display the event thumbnail image instead of the date.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media add-on 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 Files Add on: The Custom Files add on provides PHP files that let you override certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Versions: This add-on lets you include others in your organization to help manage your events and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers the capacity 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 capabilities, allowing staff to help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain areas 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 addon.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Add-on: The Ticketing add on gives you the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at the door. Registrants 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 attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Table View Template Add-on: The Events Table Template addon provides you with an easy-to-use system that allows you to change the look and feel of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also lets developers design custom templates using one of the templates provided as a source template.
- MailChimp Integration Add on: The MailChimp addon lets you auto-register attendees to a specific mailing list or group within your MailChimp account.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add-ons.
For complete details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many great testimonials that plugin users have written about Event Espresso:
”I want to commend you on a fabulous product which is just the right price for a small non-profit. People are happy with the registration process, as are we! …Thank you SO much for a great product.” Sandra Forero Bush, World Trade Center Tacoma
”Your plugin rocks! Seriously, saved me hours on the phone setting up attendance manually. Kudos. :)” William, Petruzzo Photography
”At first we looked at CVENT for one of our clients and they wanted $16,000 per year for 3000 event attendees + fees totaling $22k. That is before Staff and Webinar fees. Worst of all we had to prepay the $16k amount even if we never used all 3000 attendees. That was when we looked at Event Espresso and we realized we could build our own event system for less than 16K. For the most part we have been very satisfied with our decision. The real ROI will come next year when they don’t have to pay another 16k-22K! Over the next 5-6 years we should be able to claim that we saved the company over $100,000 – Thanks Event Espresso!” David Waterman (Long Version), KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, concert promoter, or event professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time researching the forums for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management and registration process or improve the experience of your customers.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive end-user support, as many of its end-users confirm:
”No complaints here. Satisfied customer. You can teach us all few things about customer service. Thanks!” Charles
The software provides amazing support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, custom development 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 depend on to run and manage your events.
Product Licensing Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you may want to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This option lets you configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This enables you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This license option allows you to configure Event Espresso on five domains. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
Pricing for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the software’s documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your specific situation, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of businesses.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you intend to run an event that involves managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking participants, or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Software
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