Do you currently run or plan to run events that require co-ordinating registrations, such as workshops, community classes, non-profit fundraisers, social functions, or even a large-scale event like a rave party, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event bookings is a time-consuming process. You may need to co-ordinate event schedules, availability, registration numbers, data administration, payments and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are many advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily reproduce repeat events, give you more control, improve user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up an online event registration system can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin allows you to easily set up your event and begin accepting online registrations in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online registrations)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize your event registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments 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 social media sites like Facebook.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it has been redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually retire Event Espresso 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing website or blog into a fully-featured and automated event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even 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 virtually eliminating the need to process registrations and signups manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for participants to perform the registration themselves.
Letting your attendees to do the data entry frees you up from doing administration and lets you focus more of your time on organizing a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will see in a moment, Event Espresso gives you full control over the event management and booking process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional benefits include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a 3rd-party service provider. This is made possible through a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase optional add-ons when you need added features.
- Higher Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept online bookings 24 hours a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social features and add-ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event invite other people they know who may be interested.
- Paperless Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process is conducted wholly in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to admin and record-keeping.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information you obtain from your event participants.
Features
The Event Espresso plugin delivers functionality to its customers through built-in features (these are included with the plugin) and optional features that you can buy for an additional cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of features to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Customized Event Registration Form. Event Espresso lets you gather unique information using a custom event registration form on your web pages to prepare a tailored experience for your event participants.
- Event Calendar. Registrants can easily find your events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso seamlessly integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments before running events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration allows you to configure the display of Google Maps on your event listing and event details pages.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the chance of spammers and bot software programs creating bogus registrations on your web site by using reCAPTCHA settings that confirm human activity.
- Mobile Registration And Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track participants.
- Event Check-In List. Generate an exportable list of event participants and check-in those who have attended.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can register for your events.
- Private Comments On Contacts. Record notes about contacts on their profile and how you’ve interacted with them. Private commenting helps you keep a record of when event registrants contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have helped them.
- Works With The Latest WP Version. The EE 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build visually attractive event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Country Settings. You can configure the country and currency settings to be used to promote events, including currency, currency signs, decimal characters and places, country codes, regions, and so on.
- Bulk Import Events. EE 4 provides an advanced importing feature that lets you easily import a lot of event data at once. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, registration questions, venue info, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the native WP WYSIWYG editor, so you can quickly and easily insert images and write your event descriptions without having to learn HTML or CSS, just like any WordPress post.
- One-Click Upgrading. Event Espresso offers simple 1-click updates to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event attendees and site visitors can tell others about your event using social sharing buttons.
- 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 even customize your page templates to display events in your own custom way.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for most users, and also extremely robust and customizable for higher end users and developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 enables more complex extensions and customizations to the software.
- Maintenance Mode. Pause registration capabilities for regular site visitors when you need to make changes on your site. You can still work on your content 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 software has been built using a modular and highly effective 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 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – eliminates the work of re-entering event details when creating new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse commonly asked questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned previously, Event Espresso provides “add ons”, which allow end-users to significantly enhance the capabilities of events.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Grid Template Add on: 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, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events management add on enables you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years in advance. You can create as many future events as you want. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close registrations for all of your recurring events.
- 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 be customized to display the event thumbnail instead of the date.
- EE4 Events Social Sharing Add on: Add 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 allows you to override certain aspects of the plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add-on Editions: This addon lets you involve staff 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 WordPress users roles and give 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 parts of your WordPress 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 addon.
- EE4 Event Ticketing And Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing addon adds the ability to generate tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the ability to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at venues. Customers 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 Calendar Addon: This WordPress events calendar displays events and categories of events using an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add on: The Event Espresso JSON API add on enables other software applications, online tools, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso details through an Application Programming Interface (API).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add-ons, visit the plugin website here:
Testimonials
Below are some of the testimonials that satisfied customers have posted 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
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
“Love the plugin, we only use it once a year for a race we have in February. This saved us tons of time in data entry. In addition, we had more runners register than any other year. We attribute that to the ease of registering online. Thanks for your work.” Ed, Friends of Oscar Scherer Park
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, concert planner, or event professional, there are just unlimited possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a registered owner, visit the forums for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process or improve the experience of your event participants.
Support
Event Espresso is fully compatible with other WP plugins and WP themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great customer support, as many of its clients attest:
”Thank you Seth for being so responsive and going above and beyond the call of duty with your app! I highly recommend Event Espresso for its functionality and for the stellar support. Seth has a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress and has built a tool that is seamless to use for both organizer and attendee alike! After looking at a bunch of alternatives, Event Espresso far surpasses the other apps that are available.” Wendy Troupe, ICS North Pole Express
The software provides amazing support with access to a support forum, comprehensive online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, one-on-one 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 developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Product Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a range of editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you should consider purchasing one of the ”Pro” plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This enables you to install Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Cost includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This license option enables you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This edition enables you to set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the software is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional 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.
Use the software’s documentation tools for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular situation, or to report errors and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used by thousands of people.
If you are a WordPress site owner and you currently run events that require scheduling dates and venues, enrolling participants, or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration Software
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