Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating registrations, such as seminars, group classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, marketing functions, or even a large-scale event such as a dance party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event registrations is a complex process. You need to co-ordinate scheduling, available dates and seating allocations, attendee numbers, data administration, collecting payments and invoicing, confirmations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to event registrants.
There are many advantages to setting up an automated online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for recurring events, give you more control, create a better customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered digital presence, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Software
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up multiple events and start processing online registrations literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and accept online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can use multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrollments and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with social media sites like Facebook.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the platform is being redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The EE 4 plugin software has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually migrate completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about the benefits and advantages of using this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current website into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated response emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and increase your business productivity by virtually eliminating the chore of processing registrations manually.
Essentially, you are enabling participants to enroll on their own.
Allowing your participants to do the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you spend more of your attention on planning a memorable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover shortly, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your participants to experience.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own software or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible through a model where you purchase the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then purchase add ons when you need extra features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online event sign-ups outside normal business hours. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social sharing features (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process can be transacted wholly in digital form, significantly reducing traditional paper consumption from tasks associated with administration.
- All Information Belongs To You. You own all the information you acquire from event participants.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its users through built-in features (these come with the software) and optional features that customers can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and simple to install and implement. Ready to start using in very little time.
- Custom Event Registration Forms. With Event Espresso you can collect specific data using custom event registration forms on your web site to plan a great experience for your event participants.
- Customized Notification Email Message. Set up automatic registration and payment confirmation email messages to communicate with event registrants.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with several payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments prior to running your events.
- Custom Post Types. You can Event Espresso into your WP theme and display contact information throughout other areas of your site.
- Default Prices. Set up events fast with pre-configured default ticket pricing.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to authenticate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track your attendees.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 lets you gain a better understanding of who your clients are and how they’ve done business with you.
- Waiting Lists. Latecomers can join a waiting list if your event has reached maximum capacity. Additionally, you can specify that wait-list members pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- Public Commenting. Add “social proof” by allowing potential prospects to interact with you online via commenting and previous participants to post reviews that can help others decide whether or not to sign up. Moderation settings for commenting are configured via the WordPress default commenting system.
- Works With The Most Recent Version Of WP. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build beautiful event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- 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.
- Import Event Data. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing capability that enables you to quickly upload bulk event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload information about events, datetimes, tickets, prices, registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- WYSIWYG Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WordPress WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily add images and create your event descriptions without knowing HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post.
- Registrant Records. Manage your customer’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized.
- Staff Member Management. Save time and stay organized by reusing staff profiles for multiple events or displaying their profile using a shortcode in your event description.
- Accurate Event Attendee Management. You control your attendees’ date; who has enrolled, which event they have booked and what amount they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get a quick overview of registered attendees and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export an event attendee list to a CSV file for additional uses, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and communicate with your registrants individually or all at once.
Extra features include:
- Define Extra Meta Information. This allows developers to have more control and options over the content of your event page and how your information displays to your prospective event registrants.
- Full Logging, Remote Logging. EE 4 lets you output a log file with debugging data which can be helpful for web developers who are potential application errors.
- Autonomy, Flexibility & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated 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 that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – streamlines the need to re-enter event data when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service tax to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to further enhance the functionality 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 an event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template organizes the events with many datetimes 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.
- Events Social Sharing Add-on: This addon adds social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your attendees to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- Custom Template Add-on: The Custom Template addon lets you display your events in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Editions: This add on lets you include others in the event management process and give new users the ability to create events or regional managers the ability 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 events that others create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain areas of your WP dashboard and/or certain sections 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.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration add-on gives your potential attendees 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 shopping cart. With the Multi-Event Registration addon, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on gives you an easy-to-use system that allows you to edit the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also allows developers to design their own custom templates using one of the templates provided as a base template.
- MailChimp Integration: The MailChimp add on lets you auto-register attendees to a specific autoresponder list or group within MailChimp.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and addons, visit the plugin website:
Testimonials
Below are just some of the many great testimonials that satisfied plugin users 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
”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, KT Benefits & InkItDigital.com
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, workshop planner, or event management professional, there are simply unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, go through the forums for inspiration and practical ways to streamline your event management process and improve the experience of your event registrants.
Plugin Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WP plugins and WordPress themes that follow standard WordPress development guidelines. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive end-user support, as many of its plugin customers attest:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
The software provides great support including access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email 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.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a solution you can depend on to manage your events.
Software Cost
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced plugin features, however, you may want to consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This license lets you install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This lets you run Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add ons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This lets you install Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 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. Presently, the software retails for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
Please 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 Information
The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Use the plugin’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to notify developers about errors and share feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WP event registration and ticketing management plugin, used and trusted by thousands of WordPress website owners.
If you own a WordPress web site and you intend to run any event that involves scheduling dates, times and venues, enrolling participants, or selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
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