Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as seminars, training classes, charity fund raisers, marketing conferences, or even a big event such as a show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event bookings can be a complex and time-consuming process. You need to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, attendee numbers, data processing, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to event participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate repeat events, give you more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event registration system can be expensive.
The good news is that if you own a WordPress-based web site, you can set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event registration solution.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up your event and begin receiving bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is impressively different than the older EE 3, as the platform is being redeveloped using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and features of 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 web site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a fully-featured and automated event management website … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even 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 eliminating the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for participants to perform the enrollment process themselves.
Letting your enrollees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you spend more of your time on planning a memorable event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will see shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Less Costs: Event Espresso provides you with a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a third party provider. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase addons only if you need added features.
- Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online signups 24/7. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign up process is completed wholly online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data collected from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its users through built-in features (these come with the software) and additional features that you can buy for an extra cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique features to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Custom Event Registration Forms. Event Espresso lets you collect unique data using a custom event registration form on your web pages to plan a great experience for your users.
- Customizable Event & Registration Page Designs. Match your website’s look and feel for your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s unlimited template options and components, and HTML and/or CSS.
- Tax Administration. Event Espresso 4 provides a number of ways to manage taxes for your event and report tax fees to registrants when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally or on a per-ticket basis.
- Smart 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 additional participants.
- Default Prices. Create events fast by pre-configuring default ticket prices.
- In-App Documentation Systems. Event Espresso 4 provides 3 comprehensive in-app documentation systems: Help Tours, Help Tabs and Tool Tips.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of registrants and check-in those who attend.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached the limit of registrants. Additionally, you can make it a requirement waiting list registrants pre-pay if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- Private Contact Commenting. Keep comments about contacts on their profile and how you have interacted with them. Private notes helps you keep a record of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have assisted your contacts.
- Keyword Rich URLs. Keyword-rich event page URLs take advantage of your WordPress site’s Permalinks configuration settings. SEO-friendly permalinks with relevant keywords add to the context of your events and improves your search rankings, helping you get a more targeted audience to your website.
- Country-specific Settings. Event managers can configure the country and currency settings to be used throughout Event Espresso, such as currency name, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for most of your events, you can easily set one of those tickets as your default ticket for your new events simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Multiple Event Attendee. EE 4 allows an individual or people to enroll multiple participants at once. You control how many people are able to enrol in one booking session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you engage with a community of experienced event managers, software programmers, designers, web marketers and businesses who also use the software. You can interact with other Event Espresso users via their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Staff Member Manager. Save time and keep your data organized by reusing team member profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in any event description.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post type features such as custom fields, post meta data, taxonomies, etc. You can also customize the page templates to display events in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows web developers to have more control and options over your events and how your information displays to your visitors.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for regular site visitors whenever website maintenance is needed. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: 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 objectives, the company operates on a modular and efficient 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 over 40 added features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in confirmation emails and email newsletters.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Add-Ons
As well as an amazing range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to significantly enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these add-ons 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 the event does not have a featured image available, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Drop-down Template Add on: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize the events with multiple datetimes into a dropdown list.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add on: The Category Accordion template displays the categories in a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows all events associated with that category and closes previously open categories.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Addon: This add-on adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that lets your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Files Add-on: The Custom Files addon provides PHP files that let you bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Versions: This addon lets you include others in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission 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 assign them different permissions with different privileges, allowing others to help you manage your events or the events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does 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.
- Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add on adds the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning add-on adds the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for managing check-in scans at venues. People 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 Addon: This add-on uses the WordPress calendar to display events and categories of events in a nice graphical calendar.
- EE4 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 completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track bookings, and accept payments from your website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new addons.
For full details about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Testimonials
Here are just some of the many testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”Thanks to you and the rest of the team for Event Espresso – Every time I get a signup for an event, I think about how much time EE saves me – and signups happen while I’m out on the water teaching kayaking, not answering the phone. :-)” Tue Brems Olesen, OnAdventure
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”Event Espresso is very nice and functional plugin. Set it up is not very easy for a beginner like me, but you have one of the best support team in your side. They answer all questions in a timely manor. I didn’t know anything about setting up the plugins, Thanks to Event Espresso Support team that now I can find my way around this plugin. Event Espresso helps our company to manage the workshops, keep track of our students, manage the emails, and much more. We upgrade from personal License to Business license in just two weeks of using Personal license. I strongly recommend the Business license.” Ted Karlsalr, Omnilargess
Useful Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, teacher, conference promoter, or event professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso software.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the support forum for tips and practical suggestions to improve your event management and registration process or improve the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WP plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you find that you need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great customer support, as so many of its satisfied plugin users 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 software provides great support that includes access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase 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 an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you need to consider using one of the paid plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This lets you configure Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This license lets you 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 Licensing – This option lets you install Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Price details for the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
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.
Additional Plugin Info
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the software’s 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 situation, or to notify developers about issues and leave feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used by thousands of users.
If you are a WordPress user and you plan to run events that involve managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking attendees, or reserving seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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