Do you currently run or plan to run events that require managing registrations, such as workshops, group classes, not-for-profit fund-raisers, social events, or even a large-scale event like a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?
Managing event registrations is a time-consuming process. You will probably have to co-ordinate event schedules, dates, participant numbers, data administration, payments and sending invoices, confirmations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to event attendees.
There are lots 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 previous events, give you more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website, you can easily set up an inexpensive and highly professional web-based event booking system.
Announcing …
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule an event and begin receiving online bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online bookings with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize your event registration forms
You can employ a number of event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket sales, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is fundamentally different than the older EE 3, as the platform has been revamped using a different structure to enable future expansion. The Event Espresso 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 learn more about the benefits and features of this plugin.
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your web site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing web site into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and 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 literally eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for attendees to perform the enrollment process on their own.
Allowing your attendees to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you concentrate more attention on delivering a more unique event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management and registration process that you want your attendees to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Lower Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party provider. This is made possible by using a model where Event Espresso users pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase add ons when you need added functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new sign-ups outside traditional business hours. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event invite friends who may be interested.
- Green & Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process remains wholly in digital form, reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- Own Your Data. You control all the data acquired from your event participants.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to users via built-in features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many great features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- Custom Notification Emails. Easily set up automatic booking and payment notification email messages to communicate with your participants.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with payment gateways, allowing you to collect payments prior to running the events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s details for any additional participants.
- Spam Protection. Reduce the likelihood of spamming and bot software programs creating bogus registrations with reCAPTCHA option to authenticate human activity.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system allows you to validate tickets, speed up door registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track your attendees.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 provides you with the tools to know who your clients are and how you’ve done business with them. The Contact Profile page records the name, biography, contact information, event registration information, private comments, etc. about each registrant.
- Waiting Lists. Interested persons can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached the limit of attendees. Additionally, you can make it a requirement waiting list registrants pay for their spots if you plan to add more capacity for the event.
- Private Notes On Contacts. Keep comments about users on their profile and how you’ve assisted your customers. Private commenting helps you keep records of when users contacted you, your internal comments, and how you have assisted them.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to develop your event page over multiple work sessions without publishing it to your website. You can work on your events until you are ready to take it live, or schedule your event pages to publish at a later time and date.
- Multi-Language Software. Event Espresso is is available in 15+ languages, with more translations planned.
- Default Tickets. If you find yourself creating identical tickets for your events, you can easily set up as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by checking a box.
- WordPress Visual Editor. Event Espresso uses the default WP Visual editor, so you can quickly and easily add images and stylize your content without knowledge of HTML or CSS, just like any WP post or page.
- Event Espresso Community. Event Espresso lets you engage with a community of experienced event managers, programmers, designers, digital marketers and businesses who also use the plugin. You can interact with other members of the Event Espresso community through their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and website visitors can spread the word about your event using social media sharing buttons.
- Attendee Reporting. Event reporting provides you with information of all of your 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 WordPress users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, EE 4 makes possible more complex enhancements and customizations to the application.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso lets you leverage the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reconfigure the user interface to match your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or removed from the workflow configuration.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: Event Espresso states on their website that their mission 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 company operates on a modular and highly 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 40+ added features, including:
- Live-filtering when searching for events inside the Event Espresso admin.
- Default surcharge (the same as applying a service fee to all tickets).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listing pages.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as a very large range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow plugin users to significantly expand the capabilities of the event management process.
Some of these add-ons include:
- EE4 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, a default image will be used.
- Recurring Events Management Add on: The Recurring Events manager addon lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of your 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 also be customized to show an event thumbnail instead of the date.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: This addon 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 registration.
- Custom Files Add on: The Custom Files addon lets you override certain aspects of the Event Espresso plugin.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Addon Editions: This add-on lets you involve staff in the event management process 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 allow them different permissions with different capabilities, so your staff can help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain sections of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections 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.
- Multi-Event Registration Add on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives potential customers the ability to register for 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 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 Calendar Add on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories via an attractive graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add-on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft App and Merchant Account integration all-in-one sales and business marketing software addon, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track bookings, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its software, including new add ons.
For full details about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Testimonials
Below are some of the many testimonials that 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
“I just completed my first event using Event Espresso. I really believe without Event Espresso my event would not have been the success it was.” Cathy Earle, Women Only Weekend
”I am in love with your product, I work with many educational institutions that hold classes/events and I will definitely recommend this to all of them, the only time I have seen a system this comprehensive and sophisticated is when an organization I worked with paid a programmer nearly $8,000 for a custom solution, and yet still there are features in your registration system that his didn’t have. Thank you so much for your help and patience.” Abdullah J.
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, seminar promoter, or event professional, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading the plugin and becoming a licensed user, spend a little time researching the user forum for useful ideas and practical ways to improve your event management process and enhance the experience of your participants.
Product Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great support, as so many of its users confirm:
”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
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, premium 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 software you can rely on to run and manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in a number of editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced software features, however, you should consider purchasing one of the premium plugin editions below:
- Personal Licensing – This edition enables you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything Edition – This lets you install Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This enables you to run Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost of purchasing the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the plugin retails for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the website.
Event Espresso – Additional Plugin 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 software’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing management software, used by thousands of WP site owners.
If you own a WordPress-powered site and you intend to run any event that requires managing dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, and/or reserving tickets, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management System
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